How long is a novel and at what length does it become a marketable proposition?  There are varying opinions about this with some suggesting word counts are decreasing in line with society’s move to a lifestyle focused on instant gratification.

            NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) targets 50,000 words but in his book, No Plot No Problem, founder Chris Baty notes this is a short novel.

            The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award is open to books of 50,000 to 150,000...

Today it’s my honour to speak to Sarah England, author of Expected which has been released as a Kindle ebook. Expected which Sarah describes as bad girl’s anti-chicklit is a tale about a working class girl, Samantha Sweet, trapped with the wrong man, Simon. A voluptuous redhead, Samantha has little self-belief and seems to be stirring up a whole lot of trouble. Then she meets Joel, every girl's fantasy; he is a cowboy from the Southern States. Will Samantha make her mother happy and mar...

    We hear it all the time - banter about the death of the short story, tales about how hard it is to sell short story anthologies. But might it be truer, in this modern world full of time pressures and expectations of instant gratification, to prophesize a revival of the short story.

            Short stories and flash fiction allow readers to enjoy a whole story in a short period of time. If these stories were readily and economically available for reading during a tea break or a lunch...

For those of you who aren’t WriMos – a brief explanation. A WriMo is a participant in NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month, an international challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in one month, run in November.

50,000 words in one month, it sounds daunting. 1,667 words each and every day and all this on top of work and family commitments. If you think this means that for one month you’d have to become a social hermit and abandon any thought of getting to bed before ...