Survey Follow-up
A couple of weeks ago we asked our customers to take a survey about our novellas, past and future. We were overwhelmed with the feedback. Nearly 25% chimed in, and if you work in any type of marketing, you know that is great response!
The survey allowed customers to answer three questions anonymously, and also to leave a comment. Based on the feedback we received, we’d like to provide some clarifications:
• We follow SFWA’s (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America) definition of a novella: a work between 17,500 and 40,000 words. Both of the novellas we’ve published to date—Exiles of Kho and The Scarlet Jaguar—have word counts of about 31,000 words each.
• All of our books—novellas, anthologies, and one novel published to date—use the same size font. (This excludes Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, which was a joint publishing venture with Altus Press.) We do not select the font size in order to manipulate the page count, but rather we select it based on readability and ease-of-use for our readers.
• Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life is the only book that we cannot sell to every country worldwide. We had some comments that our novellas and other books were not available worldwide, but that’s not the case. So place your orders now, we’re down to the last few copies of The Scarlet Jaguar and would hate for you to miss out…
• Speaking of selling books around the world, it costs over $13 to mail a novella to the UK (and most other countries outside the US or Canada). If anyone knows of a cheaper way to do this, please let us know! We’d love to pass that savings on all of our worldwide customers.
As for the rest of the survey, the majority of you would prefer your limited edition signed novellas in hardcover instead of paperback. But a lot of you do like limited edition softcovers, so we are looking at our financial models to see if there’s a viable way to do limited hardcovers and trade paperbacks. Please stay tuned!
