Advice needed - combining & republishing a multi-part story

[Volunteer_]

Hi all,

I'd welcome some advice. I'm in the process of combing in a 6-part story that has already been posted, into one complete story. I'm doing this because I started this story when I first started publishing and across the 18 months or so it took me to produce all 6 parts, my writing has changed and improved quite a bit - to the point where I cringe reading those first couple of chapters. It's going to be 200+ pages on MS Word. Effectively, I'm doing it for me and the very few readers who enjoyed the story and might want to see a cleaned-up and slightly enhanced version.

All 6 parts were published in the Romance category but given the size of it, is that still the best place for it? Would Novels & Novellas be better?

Thanks,
V

 

[alohadave]

@BobbyBrandt

 

[ElectricBlue]

200 pages x 300 words = 60,000 words.

Yes, that's a novella, but it's also a long story in Romance.

I take the view that Lit is a category based site, and the erotic element determines the best exposure - I'd leave it in Romance. But that's me - my novel and novella length stories are in subject matter categories, not something defined by book size.

If Romance is where your existing fan base is, you could ask yourself, will you get a similar following elsewhere?

You might need to some homework into the difference in traffic.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

@BobbyBrandt

My chaptered stories are all posted in Novels/Novellas because they are close to, or over, 100K words.

I originally posted four of these stories in chapters or parts of combined chapters. (Bear in mind that no submissions were made until the entire story was complete so readers only had to wait a day or two for the next installment to post)

Over the years, I received dozens of comments from readers stating that they preferred single submissions of my stories rather than individual chapters. Now, the individual chapters, and the stories as a whole scored good, but there was always a drop-off from the earlier chapters to the later ones.

Last summer I asked Laurel to replace the multiple submissions for each of these stories with a single submission that I provided (unedited). She advised me that she would be happy to do so, but this would make the stories ineligible for future contests and all of the comments for the chapters would be deleted. I had no problem with either condition.

It took her a few weeks to work my stories into her queue, but all of the new submissions went live last August. Since then, the scores for each of the stories have been trending 0.01 to 0.07 points higher and the feedback continues to be mostly positive. These were well established stories with my followers and many of them went back to read the stories again in their entirety. I'm sure that appearing in the new story lists for a few days helped bring some new readers as well, but I can't gauge how many.

 

[Volunteer_]

Thank you both for your advice. The document stands at about 120k words, pre editing, so I'm leaning towards Novels/Novellas on that basis alone.