Small Books Combined.

[Joe Loomis]

Hay all,

So I'm reading Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson. I have noticed that his books are broken into smaller books inside the main novel. I saw this with LOTR as well.

I can't say I noticed this at all until recently. Is this a common thing or fairly rare?

I ask because my current project is a 60k novella, but have a second "book" rolling around in my brain. I could eventually combine them into one larger book. I don't really know when to try and publish if I ever actually publish.

Opinions?

 

[Vertigo]

I sometimes see what is essentially one larger book that has been split into two or more smaller books. I'm afraid I'm very cynical about the reason for doing this. It may be that the author doesn't want to put people off with a huge doorstop (a la Hamilton/martin etc.) but, as I say, I'm cynical enough to suspect it has more to do with making two or more sales rather than one. Whilst a bigger book is often more expensive it is not usually on a word count pro rata basis. This latter sort of split typically results in a book that is incomplete and has no real ending. I hate, with a vengeance, books in series that end in a cliff hanger and no real conclusion. And that sadly seems to be becoming more and more common. I could tolerate it (just) if the sequel is already written and released at almost the same time but it is inexcusable if the reader has to wait a year or more, as is so often the case.

That however does not seem to be what you are facing/considering. As you have already written the first book, it has, presumably, an appropriate conclusion. If this is the case then I imagine your only consideration would be marketing; in that you could offer a more substantial book rather than two novellas. Be cautious though if the two stories do not have a overall story arc that spans them both. If they do not then you would probably want to sell them as two stories set in the same universe.

 

[zmunkz]

In the case of Sanderson, he seems to do it just to mark pauses / major beats in the story. Abercrombie does this in his first law trilogy too, and I’m sure I’ve seen it in at least two other authors as well. I’m actually giving the style a shot in my current WiP because I like the idea of breaking the story and adding a little epigraph.

By the way, enjoy Mistborn. That was a hell of a ride. I’m still beside myself to comprehend how he was able to continue raising the stakes book after book.

 

[Venusian Broon]

Hi Joe.

My understanding is that Tolkien wrote LotR as one book but was forced by his publisher to break it up into three books. I believe the reason was that in the early 1950's the economy was still recovering after the war and such a massive book was 1) very costly to type-set and 2) not expected to sell well. So they did so to limit any potential loss.

I do think, however, it did influence a whole bunch of later writers, and it felt to me that it became almost de rigueur to always write a trilogy of books when writing a single story. (As well as always have detailed maps). I've rebounded off that position and react against it!

 

[HareBrain]

LOTR was also broken up into six books (two per volume of the trilogy), and I think this structure was in place while he was still thinking it would be published as a single volume. I assume that was for the reason @zmunkz gave, to break the story into more manageable parts. (And from book III onwards, it also marks a change from one group of characters to another.)

 

[Joe Loomis]

Thanks for the replies so far.

What I am really thinking is that Fellowship of the Ring and Mistborne both have separate books inside the main book. LOTRs is actually almost 6 books made into three.

I'm not looking to make more money by spliting my book up, but my first novella has a clear arc. I ended it some what ambiguously because it felt right.

I am now thinking about a second book that continues the series, but with a character that was very minor in the first book getting a lot more page time.

I feel like this new minor turned major character thrown into the first book would be a blind side for the reader. The book was mainly from the POV of the two MC and this third POV felt out of place.

 

[tinkerdan]

I'm not sure you need to worry about a continuing arc if you are using the same characters and you arrange the books in a contiguous timeline.
I don't know about Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn but I do know when I read Asimov's foundation books I read them in one book The Foundation Trilogy; so perhaps in a sense Mistborn might have existed somewhere in separate pieces just as did those foundation books.

To go back to my first statement--if you use the same characters and continue the timeline the arc will exist whether you intended it or not even if its just in that the arc is the contiguous events in those character's lives.

What you should be more concerned about is that if you do call each a separate book then you should try to adhere to the three act story structure in each separate section. If you are tight enough with plot and made it three books in one volume you could almost turn each book into an act creating an overall three act structure that contains three three act structures.

The biggest consideration(in my feeble mind)however is how you intend to publish.

I've covered this before elsewhere in the forum.

If you self publish then you need to both consider the audience-target-and the genre before you make the book too large.
My first books is 250 K words plus(This started as 700 K words plus that I both split and then edited numerous iterations)and the finished piece could easily have made three 80 k word plus novels(in fact I could have split them into three distinct parts). Since my target seems to be more Young Adult because my character is a young adult as one piece this might be too much for that market as it comes to around 600 pages plus when expanded into the largest format reasonable: 6 inch x 9 inch pages.(A lot of time and money to invest in a new author.)

If you intend to self publish and have a paper copy this could get expensive for the customers.
Keep in mind I used Xlibris and they have constraints tighter than Amazon-aka-CreatSpace.
For a 600 page plus novel the price for
Hardback retail was 34.99
Trade Paperback retail was 23.99
That was the lowest they let me price them.
The lowest reasonable price for that on CreateSpace would be 15.99 however if you want to take advantage of the full distribution network it might have to be 18.99 (author royalty on these would be very low to almost non existent in distribution outside of Amazon) to qualify because with distribution outside of Amazon the other parties seem to take a larger percentage. [It is this distribution percentage that drives the Xlibris price so high in order for the author's margin to be more than just a few cents.]

If you publish traditionally they will do all this work for you. And somehow their price structure differs enough that they will always price it to what the market will bear.

Splitting my ~250 K word novel into three 80 K word plus novels I could easily price each reasonably below 10.99 and reduce to some format like 8 inch x 5 inch which can be held easier.

This is just something to think about and to help reason out why someone who wrote a ~250 k novel might consider splitting it three ways and republish without necessarily being greedy.

However while writing it's less of something to worry about and as noted above, something to look at when you are ready to publish; since you could just as easily separate the acts with simple pages that say Act 1, Act 2 and Act 3 or Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

[You could also do parts 4 thru 6 and then 1 thru 3 and then 7 thru 9; but that's another thing for another post some time.]

 

[Phyrebrat]

I see this from time to time and when I've finished the entire book, I often wonder if it was done for pure aesthetics or to try and impart some sense of grativy or scale because I can rarely see an arguable demarcation between the 'books'.

But that's my experience outside of Fantasy, so I can't comment on Sanderson and Tolkien et al.

pH

 

[Parson]

I sometimes read a book and it becomes obvious that it started as a serialized work and usually I find that off-putting. But it could be argued that the pasting wasn't done well or you would not know it. So the question about your work and whether to make it into a larger book I think awaits until book 2 is finished. Does this continue the story in an organic way or was it glued on? The first makes sense. The other not so much.