I’m transitioning from screenplays to novellas, finding potential in shorter works that could attract film interest. Despite challenges with publishers, self-publishing and audio adaptations remain viable options.

I’m tip-toeing back into print by turning my screenplays into novellas. I’ve published non-fiction books, several novels and numerous short stories since 2006. Over the past couple of years, I’ve focused on screenplays. This started when I realized a print project might work better as a movie. The adventure of writing a movie excited me. I have loved movies since childhood, and in my teens, I imagined myself a director. A disappointing grade in an introductory college film course derailed my ambition, a mistake I’ve come to regret.

That was almost 45 years ago. Fortunately, success at writing doesn’t depend on age. There’s plenty of writers who make it big well into their mature years. For me, a screenplay seemed feasible. To date, I’ve written more than a dozen features and shorts, not all of them good, none produced. I’ve joined the Northwest Screenwriters Guild, posted work on the community sites Coverfly and Studio32, and I’ve learned much about the movie business. At this point, if I want one of my scripts to become a film, I’ll have to produce it myself.

The problem with screenplays

Making a movie, even a short, is a huge commitment. You have to give everything to a project. From idea to distribution, making a ten or 12-minute short—the mostly likely scenario for me—would take at least a year. Financing a film is a whole project in itself. I’m not getting any younger. As a person who habitually hedges his bets, I wanted a second way to get value out of screenplay.

That’s when I fell back on print and its cousin, ebooks. Most of my scripts could also work as novellas or novelettes, depending on your definition (typically word count). At this point, I’ve re-written four feature-length scripts into short novellas, each around 20,000 words. Two of the best are The Red Feather and The Gods Demand Blood, both in the crime/thriller genres.

Some readers like works less than novel length. Despite its failure, Kindle Vella demonstrated the potential market. Novellas are a staple of fiction magazines, mostly science fiction and fantasy, as well as literary and crime/thriller. I self-published a novelette, The Mother Earth Insurgency, in 2017.

The multi-IP advantage

Importantly for film projects, financiers like content already available in a different medium, reasoning that the film version of an “intellectual property” has a built-in audience. I have my doubts about this reasoning, but this thinking has resulted in the book and comic adaptations that dominate the big screen these days. If one of my novellas catches on, its chances of becoming a movie rise.

For now, I’m going to submit my novellas to traditional publishers. Unfortunately, only a relative few show interest in the form. Canvassing the internet, I found only 13 publishers explicitly interested in crime/thriller novellas. One of them is the famous Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

Another problem is the refusal by the lion’s share of publishers to accept simultaneous submissions. This is unfair to most writers, especially slow, deliberate writers. They should not be expected to wait as long as a year for a response, usually a rejection, from a publisher before submitting elsewhere. Success as a writer is partly a numbers game: The more you submit, the more likely you’ll find a publisher. Refusing simultaneous submissions makes the economics of publishing for a writer unnecessarily difficult.

If I get nowhere with a publisher, I can always self-publish, which has its own set of problems. I may also pursue audio versions of my novellas, though I would likely have to use the new AI narration tools, because producing with human talent is incredibly expensive. The likely volume of sales for my books probably wouldn’t pay for a human narrator. At this point, I hope I don’t have to make the decision to go AI.

If you know of publishers interested in novellas, please comment below or send me an email.

Image by Thorsten Frenzel from Pixabay