I’ve been wanting to do a publisher’s episode for a while. Rifka and Fuzz have already said they’d be interested. Wonder if trying to loop in SofaWolf would be a good idea or just too crowded for our podcast X3
On the other hand, I can’t stand audios done by Graphic Audio, who are a professional studio. 
It’ll steer itself back eventually. If not, I’ll nudge it. 
Reading all about people getting published makes my head spin and I'm a little scared to really go forward.
Meh, like Rechan said, it’s really not that big a deal. Pretty much breaks down to follow the guidelines, be nice, and know what you’re signing in terms of contracts if you get accepted. If you’re worried about rejection, the worst they can say still boils down to “No thanks,” and at least they’re not saying it to your face. And we can help you along the way, so don’t be afraid to start threads for other questions, too.
That being said, I also have trouble making stories that are longer than 30k words. It's really difficult for me to write very long things.
My brethren! XD
Seriously, yeah, I know. I’ve managed a novel and a novella, but shorter works definitely come more naturally to me. I just don’t seem to think in novel-friendly ideas the way other writers seem to, and it’s very frustrating sometimes. But I’m working on it, at least the aspects that I can work on, and trying to make peace with the fact that I may always be most comfortable writing short, but that doesn’t mean I can’t try to stretch now and then.
Does being a novella writer limit my ability to publish as an author?
Again, Rechan beat me to it – not so much in the fandom. Outside it, if you really want a long-term career, it’s far better to write novels at some point if you can. In the fandom, though, there are quite a few stand-alone novellas published, and that’s good for those of us who can’t churn out long works as easily but still want something with just a single name on that cover.
But really, since you’re just getting started, writing shorter works will help you right now. Submitting to and publishing in anthologies is a good way to get experience working with editors and publishers – and especially in the fandom, that can help you build a track record that may make them more open to taking you on with longer projects.
I was wondering if any of the big three publishers take audio books. Usually I can get about an hour of high quality audio, and, though I'm not certain, this should be one CD's worth of audio. Is there a market for this kind of work?
A regular CD is going to run 80 minutes max, I believe. You could also do an MP3 CD and just put the files on it, which would give you a LOT more room, but the tradeoff is that not every CD player (especially older ones) can play MP3 CDs. As far as furry publishers and audio, looks like FurPlanet carries Will’s first compilation of the Anthro Dreams podcast, which is an MP3 CD, so there’s at least some precedent there. All in all, though, I think offering audio as a download would be better than anything physical, to save shipping costs. I don’t know offhand if any of the three offer audio downloads for sale, but since Bad Dog (part of FurPlanet) and Rabbit Valley already sell ebook files, it seems like an audio file wouldn’t be all that different in practice, except for the larger file size.
I wouldn’t say it’s painless. Rejection hurts at first, but it gets easier with practice. The key is to keep going after getting a rejection – as soon as one market turns a story down, send the story off to a different market. Most successful writers have enough rejections to paper an entire room. (If they printed them out… Hmm. That saying made more sense back when rejections were actual physical pieces of paper received in the mail.)
As for whether novellas are viable…
The entire industry is still changing. Way back in the day when Isaac Asimov was writing under a pseudonym, books were shorter. I don’t know the word count for his Lucky Starr books, but I suspect they would be considered novellas now. Novellas are really hard to sell outside of the fandom. Most markets won’t even look at them. However – and this is a big however – the stigma against self-publishing is almost entirely gone. It’s actually kind of spooky. Four years ago, when I self-published Otters In Space, I felt really weird about it. I went to a sci-fi convention around that time, and I met a lot of other recently self-published authors. We were all kind of defensive – either secretive about the fact that our books were self-published or militant about how it was the right choice no matter what anyone else thought. The stigma was obvious – both in how the self-published authors presented themselves and in how everyone else reacted to them. (Although, oddly, this only applied to writing events and writers. Non-writers never questioned how I got my book published as long as they could buy it on Amazon.)
The tone has shifted a little every year since then. Until last month, I found myself at a writing conference where almost everyone I met had a self-published book. It was a very professional feeling conference, but the self-published and traditionally published authors were all mixed together without the slightest stigma at all. In fact, more and more, what I’ve been hearing is that the contracts offered by the big New York publishers are so draconian in terms of the rights they take that we’ve hit the point where it’s better to self-publish anyway. And I’ve been hearing that from writers who’ve been successfully selling novels to traditional publishers for many years.
If authors who are successful in traditional publishing think that self-publishing is better, I’d say the stigma is gone.
Bringing this back to novellas – they may be too long to sell to short story markets (which are a whole different animal than novel markets and still worthwhile), and too short for novel markets – but they’re actually a really nice length for readers. So, there’s no reason that someone couldn’t build a career on writing novellas. You’d just have to find your own path, but that’s increasingly true in the writing world these days anyway.
Everyone’s said pretty much everything I was going to, but I’ll also hold my paw up for the ‘struggle to write anything novel-length’ bandwagon. This is just one of the reasons my writing ambitions outside the fandom tend towards children’s books.
I probably wouldn’t buy a print novella but I buy a lot of them to feed my Kindle, because they’re a lovely length for travelling. Same with short story collections; I don’t own a lot of those in print, but they’re perfect as ebooks.
Poetigress’ “Huntress” in “Five Fortunes” is long enough (over 40,000 words) to qualify as a novel on the ALAA’s Recommended Anthropomorphic Reading List, even though it’s within “Five Fortunes”.