Not Thriving: Novelette

Novelette looks like it wants to be an index, but doesn't have any entries on it. The description is quite short as well.

Novelette found in: 14 articles, excluding discussions.

Since January 1, 2012 this article has brought 29 people to the wiki from non-search engine links.

Note that none of the crosswicks are in the literature namespace, so a wick check is needed.

Wicks (100%):

• Agent Matt - sandbox page. Last used in 2015.
• Agent Matt - Uses Novelette as a trope regarding the length of fanfiction the creator has written. Notes only 2 of his fanfics are over 7500 words per the example.
• An Unexpected Child - Claimed to be a novelette, as it is over 15,000 words.
• Tropers/Aristocles - Created the page.
• Extended Stay - Claimed to be a novelette, as it is over 14,000 words.
• Legacy (Total Drama) - Claimed to be a novelette, as it is ~10,000 words.
• Lit. Class Tropes - Indexing
• Magna Clades - Claimed to be a novelette, as it is over 11,000 words.
• Novel - Claims Novelette as a subtrope.
• Novella - Compares to Novelette. Claims that the border between the two tropes is at 17,500 words.
• Prose Fiction - Indexing
• Short Story - mentioned in description without clarifying the difference.
• Voltalia - "Only four of her fanfics are longer than 7,500 words."

I'd like to propose sending this back to TLP if we can differentiate it from Novella and Short Story.

Never heard the word "novelette". The proper term for something that is a short book but too long for a short story is "novella".

Agreed. I thought it was short story, novella, novel.

This is the categorization I was taught. Is "novelette" even a real literary term? My spell checker doesn't consider it misspelled, but I've never heard of that term until now.

Edit: See post #13.

edited 22nd Dec '17 9:00:36 PM by GastonRabbit

Novelette is a real term. It is longer than a short story but shorter than a novella. Moreover, "never heard of it before" is no excuse to not look it up. Note Merriam-Webster defines it as "longer than a short story and shorter than a novel," while others define it more specifically.

• Short Story: 3,500 - 7,500 words
• Novelette: 7,500 - 17,000 words
• Novella: 17,000 - 40,000 words
• Novel: 40,000+ words

Note that by these numbers, some of the wicks are novelettes. "An Unexpected Child," "Extended Stay," "Legacy (Total Drama)," and "Magna Clades" all fall within that wordcount range.

Novella is a list of works that fall within that category. Perhaps Novelette should follow suit? Currently, Novelette has just a description, no list of any sort.

I deleted the entries in the Agent Matt and Voltalia trope lists because genre articles aren't supposed to be used as tropes.

I never said I couldn't look it up. My point was that it doesn't seem to be commonly used compared to the other three terms I was referring to, partially based on personal experience and partially because our page on it doesn't have much in terms of content or inbounds.

Edit: See post #13.

edited 22nd Dec '17 8:59:38 PM by GastonRabbit

We can still wick genre tropes in the description.

It wasn't just you. All three of the replies above mine were saying essentially the same thing about not having heard the word before. I've heard the word used just as often as I have the word "novella" or "vignette," and that's actually a decent amount of hearing it. Personal experience, which was the focus of those comments, is not an argument.

If this is supposed to be a genre trope, then shouldn't it be an index like Poetry? I have the same question for Novella and Novel.

Yes, that's where genre wicks belong; but In the two cases I noted, I didn't see a good place to do so.

This is a standard category of literature, and many awards (e.g. the Hugo Award) have a "Best Novelette" category. This should be treated the way we treat Novel, Novella, and Short Story. I'm not sure what else there is to say.

Note that we don't have a lot of coverage of short fiction in general. We mostly have pages for novels. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have articles for these standard categories. We may get more examples later. Especially since the shorter categories are starting to grow in the market recently, after years of decline.

edited 17th Dec '17 7:30:26 PM by Xtifr

There are plenty of Novelettes out there though, not too many I think are fully page worthy.

The Star Trek Temporal Investigations Books had 3 web only Novelettes released for example.

I think I'd like to retract what I said. I'm still curious about how inbounds ended up being so low, because that would make sense for a page that either changed namespaces or whose name isn't a preexisting term, but this page is in Main, which was the namespace early in the site's life, and it's also a preeexisting term.

Well, it is less common than the other terms. And our page isn't exactly very good. (Our Novella page at least has examples.)

Since there's really four pages here that we should be looking at and trying to make consistent, and since questions about Short Story were just raised in another thread, I'd like to suggest that we have a short-term project to sort out all four.

I used a quick search to find more examples, in case we want to turn this into a list/index. (Which I think is a good idea.)

• "The Cambist and Lord Iron"
• "Dominion and Duchy"
• "Highsong"
• "Scanners Live in Vain"
• "A World Called Maanerek"

Using double-quotes because they're short works.

I skipped fanfic for now. (I don't think there's any on Short Story either—these are subcategories of Literature.)

edited 21st Dec '17 1:46:18 PM by Xtifr

The fact that this trope is not thriving is indicative of how rarely used this word is. Not to mention that most people reading a story won't have an obvious way to tell how many words are in it.

Sorry, but what's your point? This is already a thing that exists outside of TV Tropes, so you can't only use the TV Tropes article to argue it does or doesn't exist, or how frequent the word is used.

edited 31st Dec '17 7:17:32 AM by WaterBlap

I believe his point is that there is no inherent problem for the page that needs to be fixed. The 'not thriving' aspect simply comes from the fact that the particular work length itself isn't thriving in the wider world.

Pretty much. Honestly, how does one even tell how many words are in a story? Paste the whole text into a word document?

- Estimate. The ranges are big enough for each type of literature that they don't need to be exact.

Most English words are around... 4-5 characters long? ... Get a page count, multiply by lines per page, and multiply by words per line.

In this age of computers, we have auto-tracking of word count in our word processing programs.

Sometimes, publishers / authors publish those, usually for kids novels... Lemme find an example...

Fairy Slippers by Emily Martha Sorensen:

edited 31st Dec '17 9:46:22 PM by Malady

So the follow up is...why? Does Novelette serve a purpose on the wiki?

edited 1st Jan '18 5:09:50 AM by jamespolk

If Novelette is a legit genre or format it has a place here. Such pages usually do not get many links by nature.

It's a an actual category of works, our article is just under-developed.

This being a specific form of prose writing, I think its description could use more information and I think it could include an index of works similar to Poetry. As far the article's broken-ness goes, I'd say it has to do with the fact that nothing's listed on it. There ought to be crosswicking in order to let other editors know that this article exists and to show how the page ought to be linked to (i.e. in the description).

Regarding the "how could readers tell if it's a novelette" question... If you are holding a 6 x 9 book that's only a quarter of an inch thick, you can tell it's probably about a hundred pages, and you can estimate the word count from there. You don't need to look it up and you can guess that it's either a novel or novella. Generally, we'd think of 100K words as being about 300 pages (for 6 x 9 books), making 330 words to be about a page. This would make that quarter-inch-thick book a novella (~33K words). A large novelette would be about 50 pages for a 6 x 9 book. Most publishers would either make it a collection of stories at that point or they would make the dimensions smaller, both of which would be obvious to readers ("... and Other Stories" or "Collected Works of..." would likely be in the title). Doing the math for cream-colored paper (0.0025 x 50), that comes to a book thickness of about an eigth of an inch. That is way too thin to bother with as a 6 x 9 but I hope you get my point. (Numbers based on CreateSpace, which is Amazon.)

"Word count" for books is the standard measurement because you can easily manipulate the "page count" given book dimensions, type of paper, typeface, leading, kerning, etc. But the word count can be used to compare different hypothetical book sizes.