As exciting as the changes taking place in the publishing world are, I think the opportunity ebooks present to do something new is even more exciting.

For the most part ebooks and epublishing is still so new that the majority of authors are duplicating the paper format digitally (and why wouldn’t they – it works) but as people become increasingly comfortable with ebooks, I think we’ll start to see some changes; some innovative souls will play with the format and the possibilities, and they’ll create something new.

One obvious but small change that has already occurred, or at least been made possible, has to do with the length of books.

In the past, one of the first questions a new writer would ask is:

How long should my book be?

And the answer was usually something like, Publisher A looks at manuscripts between 80,000 and 95,000 words, and Publisher B looks at manuscripts between 100,000 and 120,000 words.

But ebooks change that, in the past there might have been a few mavericks who said:

Your story should be as long or short as it needs to be.

Sage advice for sure, but unlikely to land you a publishing deal.

My own first foray into epublishing is with A God-Blasted Land, a story I probably wouldn’t haven’t written if epublishing wasn’t an option. The story is 35,000 words long, which is too long for a short story, and too short for a novel, but writing at this length means I don’t have to invent extra story to reach a publisher defined word count and can avoid what author Nancy Kress refers to as the muddle of the story, so no side trips into the enchanted forest or protracted search for clues everybody, except the protagonist, can live without in an attempt to fatten up the work.

I can also try things I wouldn’t get away with in longer stories, A God-Blasted Land is the first in a series I’m working on, and each story will probably be close to 35,000 words, but I plan to play with the timeline and different point-of-view characters constructing an overall story through the series from lots of smaller stories set at different times in the world’s history and concerned with different characters.

I don’t know if my ambition would carry me far enough to try that with novels of the traditional 100,000 or so words. I’d certainly stick closer to the core story at 100,000 words a go, but 35,000 words means I can play with an idea for a few months and then move onto the next one.

The challenge – and the fun – will be in shuffling the stories, making each one both episodic in nature and able to stand on its own.