Thoughts on... Word Count

I did not write everyday this week. (Sadface.) Well, it's not easy setting aside time to write as a mother of four. This past week I had managed to sit down in the evening to write after the kids were in bed a few times. I wrote out a scene in my notebook and the next morning I typed it up. That worked well. But there always come days when after the kids are in bed for the night my brain is just totally fried and I can barely put two sentences together. Yeah, that happened a few times this week as well.

So I'm still working out my schedule. Fitting writing time in around my kids' crazy antics is... problematic, but probably doable. Possibly when they are "napping" in the afternoon. (My kids no longer sleep, they wait. Except for the baby who is an angel.) The real problem is getting my mind to focus on the writing after being harried by them all morning. BUT! If I save my shower for after I put them in their rooms and shower before I write, that's always been known to help get me into the creative frame of mind. (This plan will have to wait a few days though since right now our water heater is broken and there are no hot showers. Sob.) I can totally do this! I can be a writing mom!

Anyway, I am still 2759 words ahead of where I was before I started writing in earnest again. I also have a new map of the region my current WIP begins in. Since ultimately it will traverse a good portion of the world, I'm working on a larger world map as well. I like having maps. It helps me to visualize the plot.

I've been thinking about word count this week because I honestly have no idea how long the story in my head is. For all you people doing NaNo right now, 50,000 is called a novel. But I'm writing an epic fantasy which are often expected to be around 100,000 words. Fantasy readers seem to like our door stoppers.I'm not really sure what my goal is for my WIP.

I read recently that these are the word count definitions used for the Nebula (Science Fiction) awards:

• Short fiction: under 7,500 words
• Novelette: 7,500-17,500 words
• Novella: 17,500-40,000 words
• Novel: 40,000 words and up

 And I know that in the world of ebooks, shorter works have had new life breathed into them. Indie authors tend to decide the price of their books based on their wordcount. You can download short stories for .99 easily. (You can also find novels for that much, but I ask where do you go from there?) 2.99 seems to be one of the go to prices for novels. (But novels how long? Shorter novels?) While I remember reading that a successful fantasy writer, Michael J. Sullivan, put up his fantasy series for 5.99 and had marvelous results. (Which makes me wonder, were these the typical door stopper fantasy novels? Does that mean fantasy readers are willing to pay more because they expect more?)

But what occurs to me is the potential in a system where price is a factor of how long the work is. You needn't write with a certain word count in mind. You don't have to say to yourself "This is a novel so I need to squeeze 100,000 words out of this story idea" or "This is a novella so it needs to be between 17,500 and 40,000 words". It seems to me that in such a world you can just write the story however it works in your head and then count the words and say "Oh, 70,000 words, I guess this one is a novel" or "This one came out to 8,000 words, should I call it short fiction or a novelette?" (I kinda really like the word novelette, by the way.) And then set your price according to what you have to offer and clearly state it in your product description:

This is a novel of 60,000 words or roughly 240 pages.

That's using the standard 250 words equals a page, which isn't really accurate, but a good average. I think I'd price such a novel at 2.99. If I did end up with a door stopper of around 100,000 words I'd probably go with 4.99. Just under 5 dollars seems a good limit for a good little future indie author like me.

So at this point, the point of all this is, I don't have an ultimate word count goal. I'm just going to write and write until the story is done and see what I have at the finish. I find that idea very liberating.