Page Count Problems (SL)

I'm still annoyed that The Year After is going to be much longer than The Murder After. I'm at chapter ten, and it's already 51 pages total! I can't combine the books because of the genre shift. (I'd also have to make a completely new cover.)

What worries me is how readers might react. I know Reanna said people read romance novellas, but how would they react if they bought The Murder After? They'd probably wonder why it's so damn short. It makes me want to add an incident Terrance describes in chapter five of The Year After because it happened during the events of the first book. But I'm tired of fixing that book.

I'll just have to make peace with the differences in page count. First book: 44 pages. Second book: probably the length of Carnival.