I’m doing mostly play by post but wanted to know if any of you ever turn your campaign into a short story or novella based on you specific campaign?  I’m toying with the idea as a present of sorts for a campaign, or perhaps a current campaign. 

So you’d base it on the things the PCs did but as a third person narrative of sorts.

Just curious.  Maybe no one would even be interested in that, maybe a self gift. Maybe at the very least it helps your own storytelling. 

I feel like if you smooth it over into a story, rather than a chronicling of the events or a blow-for-blow account, it could work.

I suspect that a far better way to go would be to either feature the player characters in a book set in the same world, or to set the book in tandem with it, so the players will recognise events they had a hand in when they're reading it, but there's no risk of misrepresenting the characters (in their players eyes) or upsetting them by havign bad things happen.

Most books feature some degree of tragedy or loss - characters die or get hurt. Dnd is unrealistic as far as story goes (was mauled to death by a tiger yesterday, recovered to a stable condition, and a good nights sleep later I'm absolutely fine) without some handwavium, so it'll be difficult to chronicle a battle in which 3 people "died", one twice having been revived, and afterwards everyone was ok. 

The broad aspects of the plot, though - the party went here, found this, fought that - can be stitched together though. It's certainly not something to discourage - you want to write it all up, do it!

The main problem with your idea is that a lot of other people have already had it. So there is a lot of competition for D&D style novels out there.

Quote from pavilionaire >>

The main problem with your idea is that a lot of other people have already had it. So there is a lot of competition for D&D style novels out there.

 I didn’t mean in a serious way, not for major publication of course. 

So "coterie" fiction is something that has come in and out of practice for at least a century and a half.  It's basically fiction written among friends, basically, or fiction written by one for a group of friends, and is usually full of references and in jokes that only folks in the coterie would get any humor out of ... sort of like a chronicle of a D&D campaign.

I'd say you could do the latter, as you've outlined, but I'd actually recommend going next level and make it a true coterie fiction where the players get to write too.  There are so many world building tools out there like Worldanvil, and there's even stuff like OneNote that does the same job stripped of the aesthetic touches.   Most of the worldbuiliding platforms allows a GM to basically make an encyclopedia, or functionally a wikipedia, of their world and can enable content and. edit access, both at a granular/entry level, to just the DM (to protect spoilers) or players.  So what I"m saying is you could provide a sort of atlas encyclopedia of "the story so far" but also give room for the players to tell the story as they saw it as well.  It could be fun, and also something you'd get the benefit of having them tell the story you made back to you.

I always thought the Avatar series of Forgotten Realms novels was a campaign written as a novel. I'm probably incorrect in that assumption since the author was Scott Ciencin and he went on to have quite a body of work from Forgotten Realms to Marvel Comics to Dinotopia. 

I'd say if you take a few of the standout moments from your campaign and sort of canonize them as short stories, that's fun, just try to have fun with it. 

Not sure about the Avatar series but a lot of, not all of, FR fiction was written with the feel of the game mechanics (largely because some of the larger novel cycles were used to go into lore changes between editions and so sorta gave a sense of how the "workings" of various game tropes had been reworked.

Dragonlance was definitely a game before the novels and written as such, railroad that it is.  TSR designer Terry Philips is credited by Hickman and Weiss for giving Raistlin his personalty and voice.