I originally published this in the ARCADIAN RECORDER on October 31 2009 but it got deleted when I transferred all of that blog's old entries to MO goes PO.***************************
Arcadian-Recorder-the-blog ( and my Twitter and Facebook offerings) represents just one side of my divided personality: call it my pamphleteer side.
I sit down in front of my laptop and quickly write out whatever grabs my mind at that moment.
Write it, post it and get over it - deathless prose it is not.
I have no intentions of collecting it, revising it and putting it out in a book-of-essays format : ugh !
Its on the net, its worldwide and its free --- which probably accurately describes its current literary market value.
But when I hope to write a novella length narrative that will still be readable, long after I am gone, I turn to a good old fashioned analog paper book that I publish myself.
Call it a mook or a heftroman if you wish (a hybrid magazine-book), to me it is simply an issue of the Arcadian Recorder journal that looks and feels like a small book.
But an environmentally 'green' book with no wasted dead trees allocated to useless padding.
With nice book paper and a nice cover stock paper - and bound so it stays open and easy to read.
And I want to illustrate it, and have the fun of printing it and binding it myself.
Call it my creative side coming to the fore.
No, novella doesn't mean it is fictional - and don't call it non-fictional either.
Italians will remind you that novella - or novel for that matter - is just what it sounds like - novel,novelty,news - which sounds pretty 'fact-oriented' to me.
Today, novella should just mean a prose work that is too long for a newspaper, magazine or journal, but is too short to stand alone in a conventional book publishing offering.
I would say anything that is from 17,500 to 35,000 words in total, (unpadded).
Conventional book publishers may need at least 190 pages to get bookstores and readers to warm to it --- that can be less than 35,000 words --- but it must still be padded out some how to that length in pages to get a fair hearing.
Dead trees falling needlessly.
Myself, and a lot of others, think that these short-read/low weight/low priced books (80 pages in an A-6 size) have a lot of legs in the new book economy.
And a handful of them can be bundled and themed into a big fat book ,if the conventional book publishers and book sellers think they can sell big numbers in a few months - the route that they regard as the only viable book business model today.
Instead, my books will be printed on my home computer and home laser printer and be available forever, but only on "demand", as customer cash-in-hand orders come in.
No more pulping tons of unsold/returned for full credit books - sorry - I just don't think its the green thing to do to a green-oriented book series.
My Chebucto Community Net website, marshall.chebucto.net , will have paypal options on it, for customers world wide.
I can mail them world wide at the low cost 50 gram letter post rate - and make money - not much money, but I will make some on each and every sale.
Their price, before their very reasonable mailing costs, will be competitive with other serious literary factual narratives : at about 10 cents per 300 words.
Frugally, I plan to sell the originals of their full color cover art painting (as well as the originals of the black & white paintings that go on the pages inside) on the same website and shipped out the same way.
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