From Macleans:
When Ben Blatt succumbed to Pottermania, he was in Grade 3, and the third book—1999’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban—had just come out. “At that age, I considered a 300-page book to be rather imposing,” he recalls of a summer spent catching up on past events at Hogwarts while eagerly awaiting the next instalment. “But then each new book that came out was longer and longer. It got crazy.” The fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, ballooned to more than 800 pages. “Of course,” he adds, “I would have read them all even if they were 4,000 pages long.”
Fast-forward 18 years and Blatt can now prove what his nine-year-old self only felt. More than just wizard tales are getting longer these days. Blatt’s recently released book, Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve, takes a big-data approach to literature. Just as complicated statistical analysis can reveal hidden truths for investors and sports teams, Blatt runs the numbers on books to uncover such things as characteristics of famous opening lines and, in one of his more intriguing sections, how authors appear to get more verbose with success. “Harry Potter was my jumping-off point, but it quickly became apparent the same thing happens to a lot of other series, like Fifty Shades of Grey or Twilight,” Blatt says. “Book inflation is real.”
This expansionary trend holds for literary works as well as popular potboilers. Going back to 1980, Blatt examined the word count of authors whose first book was a big hit or won a major prize. Among this collection of successful rookies, 72 per cent wrote a longer novel their second time out. Most were quite a bit longer. Blatt suspects the twin temptations of ego and ambition explain much of this phenomenon. “If your first book is well-received, your publisher is going to be happy,” he says. “And so you figure it’s time to write the great American novel.” Amy Tan could be considered a cautionary tale in this regard. While she scored a major success with her compact first novel, The Joy Luck Club, in 1989, everything she’s written since has been much longer and much less successful.
. . . .
Blatt admits book inflation doesn’t hold for all authors. Some stick religiously to a proven formula. Every book in The Hunger Games trilogy, for example, has the same number of chapters and sections, and almost identical word counts. But there’s plenty of evidence to support the inflationary trend across fiction as a whole. A recent study of New York Timesbestsellers reveals their average length has grown from 320 pages in 1999 to 407 in 2014. A more casual survey by a book blogger found that popular novels appear to have doubled in length between the early 1900s and today. The same thing holds for non-fiction: biographies of U.S. presidents and other important figures now routinely exceed 1,000 pages.
. . . .
“People aren’t intimidated by huge books anymore,” says Melanie Kindrachuk, a librarian at the Stratford Public Library in Ontario and chair of the provincial library association’s Readers’ Advisory Council. “If it’s a big book by a popular author, they’re prepared to give it a try.” This may be partly due to technology: a 1,000-page epic weighs no more than a limerick when on an e-reader. But it also reflects changing habits. “If someone comes into our library asking for a book suggestion, I’ll start by asking them what they’re watching on TV,” Kindrachuk says. “If they’ve just finished binge-watching Downton Abbey or Game of Thrones, I know they’ll have the patience for a bigger book.”
Link to the rest at Macleans
Wait? There’s books shorter than 600 pages in hardback? I’d feel cheated buying them.
I read a lot of chinese web novels now and some of them run over 3000 chapter, a few over 8000 chapters. The novels are essentially serials with the most profiling authors publishing 2-3 chapter per day everyday.
There’s a lot of filler and other problems but the original Chinese readers reward those lengths.
I’m grateful for series like The Murderbot Diaries, proving again that short can be fantastic. I write too long myself too often, because some of my stories just will not end, but I much prefer to read shorter books. I only wish I could get back to shorter stories in my own writing. :-/
When you get paid by the pages read it’s a delicate balance. What’s the greatest number of pages you can get the consumer to read?
After the monster that was ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, I had this image of the next book crushing children to death with its weight. I’m glad JKR decided to go shorter the next time.
A majority of what I read these days is self-published works, and they tend to go novella rather than novel length. The current thinking among self-pubs is that it’s better to write short and often, than long and long wait. It works for them, and the better books work with the shorter length.
Padding of content in both self-pub shorter and traditionally published longer is common, though, and the established very successful series tend to be appallingly padded as if the editor is afraid to tell the writer that no one will give a damn about that long scene about the hero’s current obsession with hot dogs. Not that many editors edit these day. As someone said about Stephen King, the worst thing to happen to him as a writer was believing some of his best reviews.
A book should be as long as necessary to tell the story.
That said, I won’t read too many authors that write really long novels. They have to keep me interested and I have to be able to remember by the end of the book what I started reading in the beginning.
Brandon Sanderson is pretty damned good at that.
My personal writing choice is shorter rather than longer. Word count went up a bit for my last book in the series but that’s because I had to tie up all the plot threads I’ve been weaving.
If a writer’s boring, they can bore you in 50 pages as easily as 500.
If a writer’s good, at the end of a 700-page book you’re only bummed that it’s over.
Opinions about whether particular books are “too long” or “too short” are a waste of time, really.
That seems sensible on its face, but it often doesn’t work that way in practice. Look at Tom Clancy. His early books were tautly written and of reasonable length: as long as they needed to be. Then they got longer and longer and flabbier and flabbier. They still had the good stuff the early books had, and in the same quantity, but now buried in empty verbiage. What happened? I claim no inside information, but I suspect it was a combination of his getting lazy, and too big to edit. I can easily imagine a more disciplined version of Clancy producing essentially the same books, but much shorter and much better. It is reasonable to critique his actual later books as being too long.
The way I heard it, it was different ghost writers.
???
Bit precisely ghost writers, and in any case that came later in the progression. Well into the 1990s he was putting out a book every other year, writing it himself. Then he starting bringing other writers writing in the Clancyverse. These had his name in big type on the cover, and the actual author’s name in small type. They were universally bad. My impression is that later in his life he slowed down or stopped entirely writing himself, but I had dropped out by then and don’t know for sure.
And yet, I am 100% certain that there are a lot of people who would say that his earlier books were too short and that the longer books are able to tell the story the way it should be, with all the details left in. I have never read Clancy, but I know he has a lot of fans, and given that every reader’s taste is different, his later books must be ones that appeal to a different reader than you are. That doesn’t make them bad, just not to your taste.
For instance, referencing the example below, I love Order of the Phoenix, and all of the longer Harry Potter books, because JKR was able to include all the minor plot threads and character-building that she excels at, and which gives each story incredible depth. Also, that particular book has a lot of people who don’t like it because of how angry Harry is, but I really appreciate JKR taking her time to explore the experience of a boy trying to grapple with undiagnosed PTSD all on his own in a culture that completely ignores the existence of mental health care. It made the book really long, but was a pivotal part of the series and I’m glad she gave it the space it needed.
In later Clancy’s case, it wasn’t bringing out subplots and nuances. It was mere padding with lots of repetition. It was very odd reading, realizing that you had read the same thing, often with the same words, a couple of hundred pages back.
In any case, at this point we have attained radical subjectivity. Someone somewhere might like this, so it is a waste of time to judge it. There is, on a purely abstract level, some truth to this, but it doesn’t help anyone decide what to read next.
Kinda agree about Clancy books, actually.
But I think you’re maybe too quick to transfer responsibility to the editor, rather than leave the responsibility of taut writing on the writer where it belongs.
I’m not blaming the editor. The essence of “too big to edit” is that the author has enough clout to forbid editing beyond grammar and spelling, and not even that if it is Anne Rice. I blame the publisher, who has made the decision to flatter rather than assist the author while also calculating that a poorly written doorstop will command a higher price and will have, at least for the moment, a loyal readership willing to pay the premium. Note that this is a problem for which self-publishing is most assuredly not the solution.
“Too Big To Edit” was something I wondered about back when tradpub was the only game in town. I had wondered how an author who cares about Story and Craft avoids the problem of editors who refuse to earn their pay by actually editing.
I was especially curious about that issue after I read a Chelsea Quinn Yarbro novel where she repeatedly mentioned that St. Germain had studied medicine with Imhotep. A frat boy worth his salt could have made a drinking game out of the number of times she mentioned that detail. Worse, it was a short book. But she had written it decades after the only other book I’d read from her (about a mutant woman named Thea in a dystopian setting). Definitely reached her Too Big to Edit stage by then.
With indie though, we as readers at least can separate out the writers who care still care about the reader from those who are being self-indulgent. So there is that, at least.
Quote “If a writer’s boring, they can bore you in 50 pages as easily as 500. If a writer’s good, at the end of a 700-page book you’re only bummed that it’s over. Opinions about whether particular books are “too long” or “too short” are a waste of time, really.”
Perhaps, then why comment on an opinion? Actually, I think you’ve taken my comment out of context. It was a point that just because one can watch a series that is long that then one will be able to read a long book, because one has patience.
Uh, I didn’t even read *your* comment — not sure why you think I was responding to it?
My comment was about the OP topic.
Fair enough. Sorry I misconstrued your reply.
Happens. No worries.
From the link: “If they’ve just finished binge-watching Downton Abbey or Game of Thrones, I know they’ll have the patience for a bigger book.”
I read the first Game of Thrones book after watching the show. By page 600 or so I found myself thinking about the 180 or so pages left to read. I finished, but never again. TL:WR anymore GRRM.
I only start a GRRM when I’m on vacation and need a long beach read. If I try to read at home, it could easily be a month long affair. I still have an unopened Dance with Dragons on my bookshelf.
Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve
Mauve. Why is it always Mauve.
In my stuff, the Many-Angled-Ones live in the Mauve. If you come across anything Mauve, it’s too late. It’s Lovecraft all the way down. HA!
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
Every book in The Hunger Games trilogy, for example, has the same number of chapters and sections, and almost identical word counts.
Every book that she writes follows the “Rule of Three”.
– Three parts, 27 chapters.
The series as a whole follows the three act structure, Beginning-Middle-End. Each book is split into three parts, Beginning-Middle-End. Each part is split into three groups of three chapters, Beginning-Middle-End. Each chapter has a Beginning-Middle-End.
The “Rule of Three” lets you focus on the story by asking: how does it Begin, what happens in the Middle, how does it End. It’s “Threes” all the way down. HA!
I thought it was turtles all the way down.
I never consciously notice chapters when I’m reading (unless it’s really strange) but this suddenly makes a ton of sense why some sections of the HG trilogy dragged endlessly. I wondered a few times why a boring sequence felt so padded.
I guess I got my answer, and lol, learned about another writing technique I don’t want to try.
She started in children’s TV, for Nickelodeon. She wrote scripts using the Three-Act structure and uses the same when writing books
From Wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Games#Structure
“Structure
Each book in The Hunger Games trilogy has three sections of nine chapters each. Collins has said this format comes from her playwriting background, which taught her to write in a three-act structure; her previous series, The Underland Chronicles, was written in the same way. She sees each group of nine chapters as a separate part of the story, and comments still call those divisions “act breaks”.[9]”
This is a short video where she mentions it.
Suzanne Collins Part 8 – Similarities to Underland
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F1p3cdDh-0
To tell if something is padding[*], skip that part when you read the book again, and see if it changes the story. If the part is essential, but slow, then it’s not padding.
That can happen no matter what form you choose for your story.
Ignore the “Rule of Three” at your own peril. HA!
[*] Moby Dick was written for serial publication. Roughly every other chapter is about whaling and can be skipped, which is why the abridged editions usually read better.
Yet, one person’s padding is another person’s deep look at the fascinating world of the whaling industry, so YMMV.
But some of us need the extra pages to get the reader to see what we are seeing and why. Like Steven King only taking five full pages to let you know that it was indeed ‘a dark and stormy night’. 😉
And some are just fun!
.
“That looks like your snotty, Senior Chief.”
The Marine sentry’s low-pitched voice exuded an oddly gleeful sympathy. It was the sort of voice in which a Marine traditionally informed one of the Navy’s “vacuum-suckers” that his trousers had just caught fire or something equally exhilarating, and Senior Chief Petty Officer Roland Shelton ignored the jarhead’s tone with the lofty disdain of any superior life form for an evolutionary inferior.
The start of:
Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington by David Weber
https://www.baen.com/Chapters/0671319752/0671319752.htm
One of the virtues of ebooks is that there is no need for artificial constraints on the length of a story. It can be as short or as long as the narrative requires.
It doesn’t matter if you’re like Tolkien and need a whole chapter to get your characters up a hill or like Donaldson and your character does it in two short sentences.
As for David “infodump” Weber, he uses every last gram of dead tree pulp BAEN can afford him. Which is a lot. Good stuff, though. It’s his endings (or lack thereof) that need work. 😉
Yeah, the last couple looked too much like filler (I haven’t checked ‘Uncompromising Honor’ yet in fear it’s another one that’s more flashback than it is moving the story forward.)
Nope.
I sprung for the eArc and don’t regret it.
For a change it actually moves the status quo forward.
He finally got to a point where he can continue the Honorverse without Honor. Or do the time jump he originally intended.