Today its pleasure to bring to a guest-Post by Author Thomas Dellenbusch from Germany. I recently reviewed Thomas’s work and asked the author if he would like to chance to give a little background info to himself and his work. I must admit I’m very glad indeed that he agreed 🙂

Enjoy

P.S if you missed my reviews click the following links (Spolier..both 5* ratings! ) –

The Hunt for the Mute Poetess 

The Hunt for a King

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Hi everyone, my name is Thomas. David asked me to write this guest post for you to explain how I came to my movie-length-stories and for what they are good for. It’s a pleasure to me, because there is an important question I have to you ask about a rumor that exists in the German book-scene about English readers. I’ll come back to it later.

First let me introduce myself. I am a German author and publisher, born 1964 in Düsseldorf and still living there. My English isn’t native, so please excuse, if there are mistakes in my text, in particular in grammar. From 1982 to 1999 I was a detective at police, then quit voluntarily to become a writer, predominantly for the advertising industries. In 2013 I founded a small publishing company for movie-length-stories. I’ll come back to this topic. In my leisure time (apart from reading books of course) I like to play boardgames and watching good movies.

Why Movie-Length-Stories?

Back to the topic. In some evenings my girlfriend and I do like to switch off the TV and to read books aloud to each other. One of us read aloud and the other one listen to it. It’s like listening an audiobook but live. We like that a lot, but…  What shall we read? It’s not that easy as it sounds. Obviously full-novels are no option, because they are too long. You’ll never finish them in one evening. Short stories instead? Too short. Short stories end within a maximum of 20 pages, so they don’t fill the evening. There should be something in-between. Stories that fill an evening but also end in time. Stories with a reading time of about 2 hours like an average movie. Movie-Length-Stories. A term was born.

What I am talking about are novellas with a length of about 80 or 100 pages. But novellas are hard to find in German bookstores, because they aren’t that popular in Germany. German readers love full-novels, the thicker the better. Some German book-bloggers said to me that they are convinced that novellas could only be the half-way-finished rubbish by an unable and untalented author. Isn’t that kind of thinking silly? Anyway… I am a writer, so I decided to write my own movie-length-stories and to found a small publishing company for that purpose.

Meanwhile, 4 years later, my German slogan “KopfKino in Spielfilmlänge” (theatre-of-the-mind in movie-length) has its own fanbase, and there are currently 20 different movie-length-stories (and 6 anthologies) available, 8 of them written by me and the other ones by 6 other authors under contract. The genres are typical for entertainment: from romance to thrillers, but no horror, erotica or drama.

Every single story is available as a Kindle e-book and additional as an audiobook. A friend of mine is owner of a professional music-studio, so I can produce professional audiobooks for a fair price. My thought was, that if I offer stories for reading aloud, there should be also an audio-version available. And last but not least: Most of the 20 stories are also available as paperbacks, each 116 pages.

Meanwhile I got the response from my readers that reading aloud is not the primary way to use these movie-length-stories. Mainly they are bought for all the daily interludes, a trip on the train, the bus, the car or a plane, the hours spent in waiting-rooms or at the hairdresser’s, on your coffee-break or during an afternoon at the beach, before turning out the lights at bedtime and so on.

Now I come back to my question about the rumor about English readers that exist in the German book-scene. Whenever I speak to German professionals (editors, agents, publisher, etc.) I always receive the same answer: Thomas, you should live in America or in the UK. Because American and English readers meet novellas with much more respect than German readers do. This form of literature is much more popular there than it is here.

Unfortunately I don’t know your book-scene or your reading mentality. Is that true? Do you meet novellas with more respect, do you like them? Please let me know in the comments below.

Maybe now you probably want to try out what I am talking about? Recently my two movie-length-thrillers “CHASE: The Hunt for the Mute Poetess” and “CHASE: The Hunt for a King” have been translated into English by Richard Urmston, member of the American Translator Association. They are available on amazon.co.uk as Kindle ebooks and paperback. “The Hunt for the Mute Poetess” is also available as an audiobook, narrated by Morgan Peter.

I hope you’ll enjoy these two mysterious puzzles. Let me know afterwards. Thanks in advance.

Best to you and have fun

Thomas Dellenbusch

Movie-Length-Stories.com

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Thank you Thomas!

Please do check out his work..they were a real treat to read. Head to Amazon to find out more.