Question About Length

I've been thinking today about the length of books so I'm going to ask you.  Angela, Kelly, Heather and whoever else strolls by.

All of Charles Dickens' books were written as installments and serialized in the newspapers of the day.  Only later were they put together in a book.  Book length has fluctuated over the years.  Books weren't as long 50 years ago.  Then artificially, dictated by the financial needs of the publishers as well as the cost of shipping a box of books around the country, publishers realized they made more money on longer books.  Writers were forced to pad stories and readers became accustomed to really long books that could prop a door open.

But that's old technology.  We don't have to be bound to follow rules that don't apply to digital publishing.

What I'm asking is: would a shorter length be acceptable if you knew you would get the first piece more quickly and there was more to follow?

Post a comment or email me so I know how you feel.

New Just Kate Cover

I think this will work better than the original yellow one with the coversheet to a script I wrote during my time in daytime television.  Those small details don't show up very well, sad but true.  There was an involved explanation for it---good reasons---but everyone is scrolling by so fast, none of it matters.

Waiting For You Reverts

I had a mini-snap yesterday and decided to retitle Fling/Waiting For You, to what it had been from day 1--Inhibitions.  Same book, with its true title.

Sweet Tarts and High Heels will probably be free forever at Kobo.  Right now it has an excerpt of Nothing Serious attached to it.   That will probably change.

Murder Is Exhausting is free temporarily at Kobo.  It comes with a long excerpt from Not Low Maintenance.

Just to remind you, Kobo is epub format but has apps that make it possible to read on any device.  They want people to read and make it as easy as possible with no crankiness.

I'm Pleased With Fly Away

• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #415 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
  • #32 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Contemporary Fiction
  • #72 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Genre Fiction > Romance > Contemporary

It's in the top 100 of 2 categories--I call that success.  Thank you to everyone who downloaded it.

Fly Away Freebie Today

Go to my other blog for the horrible details leading up to this moment.  Yes, I had to switch the cover.  Something that probably doesn't surprise Kelly!  I hope Amazon manages to make that happen quickly since their speed at getting changes live has been increasing in the past couple months.

It's free and being promo'ed in all the appropriate places and we'll see what happens.

FREE.  FLY AWAY. July 12-July 14.  Lis wanted to fly away but didn’t mean it so literally until meeting daredevil flyboy, Jake, who redefines the phrase "turning your world on its head".

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006IEX0YA

Update:  This is very cool.  As I've said all over the place today, I had a lot of mentoring from a nice woman who understands the process of putting a book on Kindle Select Freebie.  When I checked a while ago, her book was #1 and mine was #2.  It doesn't get better than that.  (It'll change 25 times by tomoro morning.)

Fly Away Freebie Tomorrow

FREE KINDLE.  FLY AWAY. July 12-July 14.  Lis wanted to fly away but didn’t mean it so literally until meeting daredevil flyboy, Jake, who redefines the phrase "turning your world on its head".

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006IEX0YA

5 Star Review on Waiting For You

Yes, I'm very happy about this.

Sexy and Funny,

July 10, 2012

By Riterchick

This review is from: Waiting For You (Kindle Edition)

Waiting for You by Barbara Morgenroth

Is it possible to find the one true forever love of your life at a garden party? Jemima Blume knows she has, and Dr. Jay Gold, skeptic, is helpless to resist her overwhelming onslaught on his libido. But will Jemima's documentary on the most private secrets women keep, and an unusual outbreak of extreme feminism in town, come between them?

Sexy, sensual, full of repartee, fraught with heavy issues from the past, this is a love story for people who want an adult romance peopled with adults .
Read it. You'll be swept away.

New Cover For The Ice Cream Parlor

I know!  I don't even mention this book but it's cute and informative and people buy it in the summer.  So I started fooling around with the cover.  And I wound up with this

In a way it makes more sense than having an ice cream sundae on the cover because we are, after all, talking about where you eat ice cream not that you do eat ice cream.  OTOH, there are plenty of recipes so a sundae would be appropriate as well.

I like this building.  It has a sense of humor.  So it can stay this way for a while and then I can change it again when I need a new hat.

Butterfly

I was without power for about 6 hours today so, unable to work,  I braved the heat and wind with my trusty Nikon and walked across the road.  I thought you would like to see a nice photo.  Nothing to do with books.  Nothing to do with politics.  Nothing at all.  Just a butterfly.

New Cover for Waiting For You

I spent a lot of time on this.  So I hope you like it, Kelly, and everyone else, of course.

I never could get the sky to do quite what I wanted but it still looks like summer.  I had to find a way to make more grass and more sky--that's part of what took so long.  Never mind me and my Photoshop issues!

I hope you all enjoyed the holiday and spent it with friends and family.

Genres Flowing Together

As I was discussing Waiting For You with someone over the past few days, I was surprised to hear she thought it was a romance.  It was already rejected by a well-known romance agent, so I thought of it as women's fiction. 
That's the least exciting book category in the world! 

Recently I found a new subset to YAs.  Now there are Mature YAs/New Adult.  (You know who you are!)  This didn't exist ten years ago.  I'm glad it does now!  I'm very happy there.  I always was and always wanted to do more serious or mature material but traditional publishing balked for a long while.  Probably not so much anymore but most of us have migrated quite happily to digital, haven't we?

Okay Kelly.  Which do you prefer for a women's fiction/romance/love story/romantic comedy?

Or

Anyone can comment, I just know Kelly will.  Which one of these covers makes you feel like reading the book?
If neither, can you say why that's so?