Bringing Stella Home
James McCoy, the youngest son of a starfaring merchanter family, never thought he would face an invasion. But when a barbarian war fleet from the edge of known space carries off his brother and sister, nothing will stop him from getting them back.
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I have a lot of free and permafree books. Most of them are short, though: short stories under 10k words, with one novelette between 10k and 20k words and one novella between 20k and 40k words. Until now, I had only one permafree full-length novel: Bringing Stella Home at just under 100k words.
(As a side note, it makes very little sense to me why 7,500 words should be the cutoff length for a short story. Why not 10k words? It doesn’t take that much longer to read a 10k word story than a 7.5k word story. And if the concern is being able to read it comfortably in a single sitting, or in a single podcast episode, then it makes more sense to make 5k words the cutoff. There is a huge difference in the reading experience between a 4k story and a 7k story, but a 7k story and a 10k story? Not so much. Same with the 15k word cutoff for novelettes; 20k words makes much more sense to me.)
It’s been about nine months since I made Bringing Stella Home one of my permafrees, and to make a long story short, I’ve found that it really doesn’t move the needle. Part of this may be due to the fact that all of the Gaia Nova books are technically standalones, with a few recurring characters. Bringing Stella Home doesn’t lead directly into another book (though Heart of the Nebula is a direct sequel).
But another reason, I suspect, is because when readers download a free book, they aren’t expecting to get a full-length novel. They’re expecting to get something short that they can read in a couple of sittings, without having to make a major time commitment. When they find that they’ve downloaded something that might take them ten hours or more to read, it puts them off, especially if it’s from an unknown author.
Since the whole reason for giving away free books is to introduce my books to new readers, if they aren’t actually reading those free books because they are too long, why should I keep giving them away for free? Better to give away a bunch of shorter books that readers will actually read.
So in the next couple of weeks, I’m going to revert Bringing Stella Home back to $4.99. At some point in 2023, perhaps in February or March, I will release a boxed set of the Gaia Nova novels and focus my promotional efforts on that, rather than trying to do the first-in-series free thing (which doesn’t actually work for this series, since there technically is no first book).
So if you haven’t already picked up the ebook edition of Bringing Stella Home, now is a good time to do that.
