Amongst my Tweets today was one from 40 K saying they are looking for submissions of novelettes and novellas in the following areas:

• Sci-fi
• Mystery
• Thriller
• Horror
• Noir
• “Smart” romance
• Paranormal romance
• “Smart” chick-lit.

A couple of definitions to help you here:

Novelette (a term first used by Robert Schumann for a piece of music) – 7,500 to 17,500 words of prose fiction.

Novella – longer than a novelette at 17,500 to 40,000 words of prose. Some defintions give up to 70,000 words. Doesn’t have to be divided into chapters. Usually fewer but more complicated conflicts than a novel. Stephen King describes the novella as “an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic”!

And just for interst, a novel is prose fiction of 40,000 words of more, although usually word count is higher than this. The count depends on the genre to a large extent. Thrillers are often around 100,000 words, while a mystery or lit-chick might be 60,000 to 80,000.

There’s a detailed guide on how to submit a top-notch query to them here.

I also happened across an excellent blog here which has a breakdown of best-selling genres. Derek Canyon looked at genres of books selling 1000+ copies a month, and these are respectively romance 16%, paranormal 15%, thriller 12%, mystery 12%, fantasy 8%, science fiction 7%, young adult 5%, comedy 4%. Horror, crime, non-fiction and historical have 3% of this market each, while urban fantasy, occult, contemporary, dating, commercial and biography have 1% each. This is certainly something to take on board. He also found that authors with 3 books or more are the most likely to be making the big sales of each book. So get those books out there!