I posted this on my Facebook page, which is where I’m the most active with my readers if you care to join us…
I wanted to address a couple of questions I’ve seen about DESIRE’s length. Yes, DESIRE is shorter. I stated that up front (on my FB page) when I was about to publish DESIRE. Please keep in mind that most Young Adult (YA) books are 60-80K words. My BKoD books have been long, running from 93-123K. That is VERY RARE in most YA or even NA (New Adult) books. I had no intention of DESIRE being more than a novella length (35K words max) when I first started it. As I’d initially planned it, DESIRE was supposed to be an aside to the main story, since it was going to be more about Nara and her family and Ethan and his family. But the story took on a life of its own, and before I knew it, DESIRE turned out to be almost 65K** and WAY more than an aside story. I added so much more to the development of Ethan and Nara in DESIRE, things that fundamentally tie back into the main story arc. **As a FYI, 65K is considered novel length by industry standards.
In a follow up question on the thread, I posted this about book 5.
Here’s the long answer about book 5. I don’t plan to write another honking doorstop book like DESTINY. 128K is too long and becomes unwieldy to edit and dangerous in Microsoft Word, due to instability issues with files larger than 120K. I know, I had it happen with my book A TASTE FOR CONTROL years ago; ATFC’s file data got corrupted and it was a nightmare to fix. I would’ve split DESTINY if I could’ve found a natural place to split it, but I couldn’t, so I left the length.
If book 5 turns out to be 110-120K, I can deal with that length. But if book 5 is going to run over 130K I will consider splitting the book into two parts, and instead of one more book, the last “book” will come out in parts I and II. There’s a lot of story left to tell…so we shall see. 🙂
As for more books…after that. I’ll see how things pan out after this last leg of Ethan and Nara’s journey.
Thank you all for loving ETHAN and NARA, for cheering for them and telling others about their epic journey. I hope you’ll continue on their path with them.
P.T.