The novelette is a literary form that is growing in popularity, particularly among independent authors. With a recent search of the Amazon books category for the key term “novelette” yielding 3000 hits, I felt safe applying it to my ebook, Water of Life.
When I first read this term in blogs, I suspected a misprint (because I always suspect misprints) for novella. I studied novellas in school: A compact work that maintains the classic unities of time, place, and action and is of an intermediate length between a short story and a novel.
Not all stories of intermediate length are so very fussy about unity, however, and novella is often defined strictly based on word count: 17,000 to 40,000. (Merriam-Webster) That is, between sixty and a hundred and sixty printed pages.
Many well-known classics are novellas: From A Christmas Carol to Animal Farm, from The Red Badge of Courage to Ethan Frome, novellas are the friend of high-school literature teachers everywhere. Goodreads has quite a long list.
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1236.World_s_Greatest_Novellas
So where does novelette fit in? The term itself is not a new one. First used in print in 1780 ( Merriam-Webster), a novelette was a short book of a sentimental and romantic nature. According to Goodreads, the 1955 Hugo Awards (for best science fiction/fantasy writing) introduced the novelette category for works in the 7,500 to 17,500 word count range.
The term continues to be most commonly encountered in genre writing, although many classic stories are also of this length, hanging out in the literature anthologies awkwardly labeled “long short stories,” for example, The Dead and Sonny’s Blues.
I hope the novella/novelette trend in publishing means that writers feel they can allow their stories to be the length they needs to be. Many awkward novels are the result of stuffing unnecessary words into a novella. And many confusing short stories are overly-pruned novelettes.
Several nice blogs about novellas and novelettes
are linked below.