Talk:Spore (short story)

Should be DAB as a novella, not a short story
Short stories are a few pages long; Spore and the other Eshorts were marketed and are novellas, and should be disambiguated in the titles as novellas, not short stories. 68.146.70.124talk to me 06:38, December 16, 2013 (UTC)
 * Since this is an issue dealing with more than one article, you might want to bring it up at Board:The Panopticon. Shambala108 ☎  14:38, December 16, 2013 (UTC)
 * No need. The issue was already discussed. The anonymous poster, above, is wrong in his or her assumption that they "were marketed [as] novellas". As this initial press release makes clear, Penguin definitely called them "short stories" and "eshorts", so that's the way we went.


 * In any case (novella) is not a valid dab term on this wiki. For simplicity, things are either (novel) or (short story) here, with the distinction generally being whether the story had a stand-alone release, not its length. Ordinarily, that would mean that we'd use (novel) here — since all of these were released individually. The main reason we're not is because Puffin actually marketed them as "short stories".  But the secondary reason is that there is general confusion in the publishing trade as to what exactly these are. Some publishers call them short stories and others call them novellas. One industry observer recently straddled the fence by calling them "something beyond a short story and edging up to the length of a novella".


 * This confusion doesn't help a wiki. The nature of our endeavour means that we have to have a single name for a page. So we went with Puffin's definition of an eshort: (short story).


 * If the popularity of eshorts grow in Doctor Who fiction at the same rate as they appear to be doing in general publishing, it may be that we allow the dab term (eshort) and come back and re-dab these pages. But for the moment, it's unclear whether this format has actually worked for DWU readers, and therefore whether there will be more to come.  17:14: Mon 16 Dec 2013