ABSTRACT
In the twentieth century, when the publishing industry’s focus was on a print-based product, cost and pricing concerns were seen to make the novella a challenging proposition. In the twenty-first century, ebook and audiobook markets have grown dramatically, and each of these platforms offers the opportunity to approach novella pricing differently. At the same time, mid-list, mid-career authors have seen their writing incomes shrink, while their ability to be in contact with their dispersed readerships through social and other media has grown. The Wisdom Tree experiment was a doctoral project centred on the writing of five novellas by a mid-list, mid-career author, with a concurrent exploration of contemporary publishing practices facilitating the development and testing of an innovative multiplatform publishing model, harnessing the author’s social media following and level of recognition among media and writers’ festival directors. The performance of Wisdom Tree is compared with the author’s earlier single-volume collection of novellas and stories, Welcome to Normal, using predetermined quantifiable indicators, such as number of reviews, number of media interviews and discussions, number of festival appearances and other events, and author earnings. Compared with the industry-standard approach of a single-volume trade-paperback bind-up, the multiplatform series model yielded noticeably superior results, offering the publishing industry a novella series publishing model worthy of further exploration.
