The Bookseller - Comment - Does size matter?

When I was young, I dreamed of being a novelist. Not a writer, not an author, but a novelist. I'm not even sure why the distinction was that important to me, or what I thought the difference was; I just liked the word.

I can't remember when I became aware of the concept of a novella, that size of book that sits between short story and novel, but it would have been around my teenage years I would guess. I'm pretty sure, however, that I was in my forties before I realised that, between the novella and the short story, there was such a thing as a novelette.

There's no consensus on where the boundaries between novel, novella and novelettes sit. The most practical (if not the only practical) application of the idea of a word-count limit is with awards. Most awarding bodies will have some criteria by which your book must be judged to be eligible, and I do get this. If you've spent years writing a 150,000-word behemoth, you might feel piqued to be beaten to that literary prize by a 20-page pamphlet. But outside of judging criteria, why do some writers seem to obsess about this?