My experiences as a bookseller over a couple of decades would tend to suggest the genre keeping the lights on in the bookstore the most (romance, which you don't mention) has had a readership long happy to enjoy shorter-length works. Or at least, there doesn't tend to be as many much-larger-length works as in SF, for sure. Category romance also tends to shift to the shorter side, be it 200 pages/55k words or so.
Similarly, romance novellas—especially in the age of e-readers—have had an up-tick, especially among queer and/or BIPOC narratives. It feels like the genre itself can often lend itself to a shorter/tighter narrative (the holiday novella boom alone every year come winter is kind of amazing to watch).
I think romance is naturally limited because of why your reader is involved with the story in the first place. The romantic tension has to go somewhere within a reasonable period of time, or turn of pages. Long term relationships are for the most part boring, the romance is always short and heady.
Interesting, and I'm in agreement. One quibble, though: it's not true that "...editing, layout..." costs are the same over 100 pages as over 400. I speak as a guy who's designed about three dozen books (for small presses) and I charge more to design a 400 pager than a 100 pager -- because it takes me much longer. And the editors I know would agree, too. None of this takes away from the thrust of this excellent posting.
Hi Don, yes your correct it does take longer to layout or copyedit longer text. Definitely for freelance work, but also for in-house staff. I think the effect on book price is probably marginal but you're right I shouldn't say that it's nothing!
Genre publishers like TOR do publish (and advertises as such) novellas in the United States, usually ranging upwards from around 96 pages to around 172, and they have become popular in the last half a decade.
Yes, I did have an aside noting "the SFF world is more receptive to novellas than other genres" and Tor publishes some great ones. I don't know how the sales compare. I do remember the Tor imprint Tor.com Publishing started out only doing novellas but then quickly started publishing long novels, I assume because they sell much better although I don't know.
Detective stories have undergone the same bloat, and suffered as a consequence. An experienced reader can reasonably expect to keep track of all the salient facts and red herrings in an investigation that extends over, say, 130 pages between the murder and the denoument. When that stretches to 200 or even 300 pages, they no longer have the capacity to discriminate between principled detection and arbitrary guesswork. "And so -- thanks to the button clue on page 237 -- we know that it must have been Von Blitzengard who hired the hearse which...."
Hence the revived and ever-growing popularity of Golden Age detective fiction, which usually goes straight to the point and gets on with it.
It's not unusual to see detective stories over 400 padded pages with extraneous "historical" detail, "atmosphere," attempts at characterization of female characters. I too have retreated to Golden Age detectives.
Thought this was really fascinating. Thanks for the breakdown. I really love Bolaño's shorter works and I think my favorite Moshfegh book is McGlue. 112 pages is my ideal length for a book.
I think you missed a major reason for the increase of novel length in the 20th century – the advent of the word processor. I worked as a typesetter for Contemporary Books in the 1980‘s and we noticed that as word processors and personal computers became more common over the decade the manuscript lengths increased measurably.
The problem I have with a lot of novels these days is yes, they are thick, so far as measurements go, but the font is large, the margins wide and there are often blank pages. Had Lincoln Michel measured word count, I suspect he might find the novels weren't quite as big as they appear.
I've been a SFF reader my entire life. Yes I would got to the library and primarily choose an author based on how many books in their series there were and how long each one was. The bigger the better. As an insomniac teen there was nothing worse than running out of pages at 2am when you couldn't sleep. Also being a reality escapist I hated getting into a world completely only to have no further books in that milieu to read. Bring back the 80's and the never ending series by famous authors.
As a writer I started with novels, but have found a recent love of shorter works. I'm a fan of the novella and short story now. I like being able to switch up characters, milieu and theme and having no flat spots to get through as with longer drama's. I can easily write 3,000-6,000 words a day so shorter format works well for me.
I didn't really dig into the various genres too much in this article. But I agree Romance is definitely a big chunk of the industry!
Although it's not quite true it drives the most revenue from the data I've seen. The biggest adult fiction categories for traditional publishing are what gets called "general fiction" (aka "literary fiction," "historical fiction," "women's fiction," etc.) followed closely by mystery/thriller genre. Romance is third, from the data I've seen. Science fiction and fantasy fourth. The other categories like Westerns are very small these days.
My first novel (historic/adventure/humor/romance/drama - I know) came in at 52,000 words. I think a story should decide its own length, not some arbitrary ideal word count. I didn't want to pad it just to get a larger word count. I wondered if it was a novella, but everyone said anything over 50,000 could be considered a novel. So I call it a novel. My sequel novel features the same characters (for the most part) but an entirely different story (although continuing from where the first ended.) So I will call it the second novel in a series. I expect it to be around the same length. I tend to write concisely, so I like shorter novel lengths.
A few comments from someone who has worked in publishing for 30 years, first at Avon Books, one of the top mass market publishers, though the '90s and more recently at Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin's.
You write: "The price of a book has very little to do with the physical materials of the book." That is categorically untrue.
At Avon it was important to get at least a 10:1 unit cost: price ratio in mass for an everyday book, but you wanted as much as 20:1 for the "superleads" such as Johanna Lindsey. This ratio would be called out in our post-mortem meetings by our president, it was so important. There were books I couldn't buy for reprint in mass, in fact, such as COBB by Al Stump and LIZ by C. David Heymann, as much as I loved them, because our low projected sales and, thus, our elevated unit cost gave me no more than a 6:1 ratio.
On the flip side, I was the editor for the revised edition of THE A-Z CROSSWORD PUZZLE DICTIONARY, which sold 17-18K copies a month in mass. So the unit cost was pretty low despite being around 1000 pages. To figure the price, I went to the Doubleday bookstore on Fifth Avenue around the corner from our office to check out the competition, all of which wasn't even half our size and which ranged in price from $3.99 to $5.99. So we priced A-Z at $4.99 in order to dominate the competition and make it a category killer. We could do that because the unit cost was so low..
SMP today has a page and pricing meeting where this very issue is discussed in detail (while also looking at the prices of competing titles so we're not too far ahead of the market; book prices have actually lagged inflation considerably). For instance, a 1,000-page bio I edited (1000 pages after I cut out several hundred) cost so much to print, we had to price it at $40, which was a potential problem because B&N might not have wanted it at that price (they liked $35). Now you're seeing a lot more $40 books, such as Obama's, but that price was probably more to make up the titanic advance (as was turning his one book into two).
You could also add decorative elements to justify a higher price such as stepback cover (or two stepbacks), embossing, foil, etc. (You would also add these elements to make the book seem like a "big book," even if it wasn't, which how we launched James Rollins' career.) On the other hand, if, say, the elevated unit cost of a book with foil on the cover would hurt your p&l, then you couldn't have the foil and would have to substitute, say, a fifth-color metallic. The same's true for picture inserts: if color was too much for the p&l to bear at your target price, then b/w it would have to be (note: paper quality has gotten good enough that you can print b/w in the book itself, which eliminates much of that extra cost). My production manager at Wiley, for this reason, constantly refused my requests for french flaps, bookmarks and holograms on the cover. (Note: MEGATRENDS 2000 had a hologram on the cover of the mass edition because its unit price, based on projected sales, would allow it.)
The move to "quality trade" was kind of a backformation of this ratio, I think. To charge more, the books didn't necessarily have to be longer but they had to have a higher quality construction. Thus mass rack-fitting trade paperbacks with better paper and sturdier covers for 9.99 or $10.99 instead of mass markets for $4.99 to $8.99. (It also screws the author a bit, given that the 7.5% retail royalty on a $10 quality trade edition is less than the 10% royalty on a $7.99 mass edition.)
As to why books are getting longer, your original question, you might also look at their curb appeal. In fantasy a big book suggests a big world. In history, bio and fiction, length doesn't just signify the importance of the book. It says that their readers are important too. (There's a reason all those people on media zoom's have POWER BROKER in the background.). But I also agree with the value proposition. If I'm going to spend $10.99 for an airplane read, I want it to be so long a read I'll need to use frequent flier miles to finish it.
In addition to serialization, another interesting account of the length of Victorian novels attributes it to the power of the circulating libraries (Mudie's, in particular) in the UK. As books were too expensive for most people to own, and a public library system hadn't yet been established, Mudie's attracted a large base of subscribers and became one of the single largest purchasers of books. They used a tiered subscription system, with the lowest rate allowing a subscriber to borrow one volume at a time. Mudie's essentially cemented the market for the three-volume (or triple-decker) novel because it enabled them to either lend a single novel to three subscribers simultaneously or have a single novel count as the maximum three volumes for subscribers who paid the higher rate. Given their purchasing power, the demand among publishers was that any novel had to fill three volumes.
Interesting article, and this is the second recommendation of Fever Dream that I've come across recently, so I'll take that as a sign!
Thanks for the insight, Lincoln. I'll never get around to writing anything beyond my usual fare for product copy and review. Nevertheless, because I have aspirations, I keep my ear to the ground for articles like yours. Why is it, since I have your ear, paperbacks are pushed off, effectively leaving buyers like me in hind teat status?
This is also why there is a type of book called (in industry lingo) the "paperback originals." That's when the first release is paperback and there never is a hardcover.
It's standard operating procedure in publishing. I imagine it's pretty much to not canabalize hardcover sales, so the same reason that movie studios release movies in theaters first and then sell to streaming networks 6 months later (in pre-COVID times at least). Or why video games sell for more initially, then get cheaper on steam later. You hope the biggest fans buy first?
There's also a promotional benefit with books though because you can have a second publicity push when the paperback comes out. So each book gets effectively two releases, in a sense.
My best works are two unpublished novels each in excess of 200k words. I kept a meticulous written record of the 120 (240 total), agent and publisher rejections. When a reason was given it was, “too long.” One agent said they “might take a look at it if it were 85k.” Both manuscripts are what the market calls “historical fiction.” I now write novellas and self publish.
My experiences as a bookseller over a couple of decades would tend to suggest the genre keeping the lights on in the bookstore the most (romance, which you don't mention) has had a readership long happy to enjoy shorter-length works. Or at least, there doesn't tend to be as many much-larger-length works as in SF, for sure. Category romance also tends to shift to the shorter side, be it 200 pages/55k words or so.
Similarly, romance novellas—especially in the age of e-readers—have had an up-tick, especially among queer and/or BIPOC narratives. It feels like the genre itself can often lend itself to a shorter/tighter narrative (the holiday novella boom alone every year come winter is kind of amazing to watch).
I think romance is naturally limited because of why your reader is involved with the story in the first place. The romantic tension has to go somewhere within a reasonable period of time, or turn of pages. Long term relationships are for the most part boring, the romance is always short and heady.
Interesting, and I'm in agreement. One quibble, though: it's not true that "...editing, layout..." costs are the same over 100 pages as over 400. I speak as a guy who's designed about three dozen books (for small presses) and I charge more to design a 400 pager than a 100 pager -- because it takes me much longer. And the editors I know would agree, too. None of this takes away from the thrust of this excellent posting.
Hi Don, yes your correct it does take longer to layout or copyedit longer text. Definitely for freelance work, but also for in-house staff. I think the effect on book price is probably marginal but you're right I shouldn't say that it's nothing!
Genre publishers like TOR do publish (and advertises as such) novellas in the United States, usually ranging upwards from around 96 pages to around 172, and they have become popular in the last half a decade.
Yes, I did have an aside noting "the SFF world is more receptive to novellas than other genres" and Tor publishes some great ones. I don't know how the sales compare. I do remember the Tor imprint Tor.com Publishing started out only doing novellas but then quickly started publishing long novels, I assume because they sell much better although I don't know.
Maybe Ace Doubles can make a comeback!
Detective stories have undergone the same bloat, and suffered as a consequence. An experienced reader can reasonably expect to keep track of all the salient facts and red herrings in an investigation that extends over, say, 130 pages between the murder and the denoument. When that stretches to 200 or even 300 pages, they no longer have the capacity to discriminate between principled detection and arbitrary guesswork. "And so -- thanks to the button clue on page 237 -- we know that it must have been Von Blitzengard who hired the hearse which...."
Hence the revived and ever-growing popularity of Golden Age detective fiction, which usually goes straight to the point and gets on with it.
It's not unusual to see detective stories over 400 padded pages with extraneous "historical" detail, "atmosphere," attempts at characterization of female characters. I too have retreated to Golden Age detectives.
Thought this was really fascinating. Thanks for the breakdown. I really love Bolaño's shorter works and I think my favorite Moshfegh book is McGlue. 112 pages is my ideal length for a book.
I will publish my novel as a string of 10,000 tweets
I think you missed a major reason for the increase of novel length in the 20th century – the advent of the word processor. I worked as a typesetter for Contemporary Books in the 1980‘s and we noticed that as word processors and personal computers became more common over the decade the manuscript lengths increased measurably.
The problem I have with a lot of novels these days is yes, they are thick, so far as measurements go, but the font is large, the margins wide and there are often blank pages. Had Lincoln Michel measured word count, I suspect he might find the novels weren't quite as big as they appear.
I've been a SFF reader my entire life. Yes I would got to the library and primarily choose an author based on how many books in their series there were and how long each one was. The bigger the better. As an insomniac teen there was nothing worse than running out of pages at 2am when you couldn't sleep. Also being a reality escapist I hated getting into a world completely only to have no further books in that milieu to read. Bring back the 80's and the never ending series by famous authors.
As a writer I started with novels, but have found a recent love of shorter works. I'm a fan of the novella and short story now. I like being able to switch up characters, milieu and theme and having no flat spots to get through as with longer drama's. I can easily write 3,000-6,000 words a day so shorter format works well for me.
No mention of the juggernaut genre that is romance? It's mind boggling how people in this industry still ignore the most revenue-driving genre.
I didn't really dig into the various genres too much in this article. But I agree Romance is definitely a big chunk of the industry!
Although it's not quite true it drives the most revenue from the data I've seen. The biggest adult fiction categories for traditional publishing are what gets called "general fiction" (aka "literary fiction," "historical fiction," "women's fiction," etc.) followed closely by mystery/thriller genre. Romance is third, from the data I've seen. Science fiction and fantasy fourth. The other categories like Westerns are very small these days.
My first novel (historic/adventure/humor/romance/drama - I know) came in at 52,000 words. I think a story should decide its own length, not some arbitrary ideal word count. I didn't want to pad it just to get a larger word count. I wondered if it was a novella, but everyone said anything over 50,000 could be considered a novel. So I call it a novel. My sequel novel features the same characters (for the most part) but an entirely different story (although continuing from where the first ended.) So I will call it the second novel in a series. I expect it to be around the same length. I tend to write concisely, so I like shorter novel lengths.
A few comments from someone who has worked in publishing for 30 years, first at Avon Books, one of the top mass market publishers, though the '90s and more recently at Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin's.
You write: "The price of a book has very little to do with the physical materials of the book." That is categorically untrue.
At Avon it was important to get at least a 10:1 unit cost: price ratio in mass for an everyday book, but you wanted as much as 20:1 for the "superleads" such as Johanna Lindsey. This ratio would be called out in our post-mortem meetings by our president, it was so important. There were books I couldn't buy for reprint in mass, in fact, such as COBB by Al Stump and LIZ by C. David Heymann, as much as I loved them, because our low projected sales and, thus, our elevated unit cost gave me no more than a 6:1 ratio.
On the flip side, I was the editor for the revised edition of THE A-Z CROSSWORD PUZZLE DICTIONARY, which sold 17-18K copies a month in mass. So the unit cost was pretty low despite being around 1000 pages. To figure the price, I went to the Doubleday bookstore on Fifth Avenue around the corner from our office to check out the competition, all of which wasn't even half our size and which ranged in price from $3.99 to $5.99. So we priced A-Z at $4.99 in order to dominate the competition and make it a category killer. We could do that because the unit cost was so low..
SMP today has a page and pricing meeting where this very issue is discussed in detail (while also looking at the prices of competing titles so we're not too far ahead of the market; book prices have actually lagged inflation considerably). For instance, a 1,000-page bio I edited (1000 pages after I cut out several hundred) cost so much to print, we had to price it at $40, which was a potential problem because B&N might not have wanted it at that price (they liked $35). Now you're seeing a lot more $40 books, such as Obama's, but that price was probably more to make up the titanic advance (as was turning his one book into two).
You could also add decorative elements to justify a higher price such as stepback cover (or two stepbacks), embossing, foil, etc. (You would also add these elements to make the book seem like a "big book," even if it wasn't, which how we launched James Rollins' career.) On the other hand, if, say, the elevated unit cost of a book with foil on the cover would hurt your p&l, then you couldn't have the foil and would have to substitute, say, a fifth-color metallic. The same's true for picture inserts: if color was too much for the p&l to bear at your target price, then b/w it would have to be (note: paper quality has gotten good enough that you can print b/w in the book itself, which eliminates much of that extra cost). My production manager at Wiley, for this reason, constantly refused my requests for french flaps, bookmarks and holograms on the cover. (Note: MEGATRENDS 2000 had a hologram on the cover of the mass edition because its unit price, based on projected sales, would allow it.)
The move to "quality trade" was kind of a backformation of this ratio, I think. To charge more, the books didn't necessarily have to be longer but they had to have a higher quality construction. Thus mass rack-fitting trade paperbacks with better paper and sturdier covers for 9.99 or $10.99 instead of mass markets for $4.99 to $8.99. (It also screws the author a bit, given that the 7.5% retail royalty on a $10 quality trade edition is less than the 10% royalty on a $7.99 mass edition.)
As to why books are getting longer, your original question, you might also look at their curb appeal. In fantasy a big book suggests a big world. In history, bio and fiction, length doesn't just signify the importance of the book. It says that their readers are important too. (There's a reason all those people on media zoom's have POWER BROKER in the background.). But I also agree with the value proposition. If I'm going to spend $10.99 for an airplane read, I want it to be so long a read I'll need to use frequent flier miles to finish it.
Also... fewer "editors" means fewer edits.
In addition to serialization, another interesting account of the length of Victorian novels attributes it to the power of the circulating libraries (Mudie's, in particular) in the UK. As books were too expensive for most people to own, and a public library system hadn't yet been established, Mudie's attracted a large base of subscribers and became one of the single largest purchasers of books. They used a tiered subscription system, with the lowest rate allowing a subscriber to borrow one volume at a time. Mudie's essentially cemented the market for the three-volume (or triple-decker) novel because it enabled them to either lend a single novel to three subscribers simultaneously or have a single novel count as the maximum three volumes for subscribers who paid the higher rate. Given their purchasing power, the demand among publishers was that any novel had to fill three volumes.
Interesting article, and this is the second recommendation of Fever Dream that I've come across recently, so I'll take that as a sign!
Too bad your new preorder is a hardback, ebook, or audiobook because paperback is the only thing I purchase. Sigh.
There will be a paperback! But probably 6-12 months after the hardcover release I'm afraid.
Thanks for the insight, Lincoln. I'll never get around to writing anything beyond my usual fare for product copy and review. Nevertheless, because I have aspirations, I keep my ear to the ground for articles like yours. Why is it, since I have your ear, paperbacks are pushed off, effectively leaving buyers like me in hind teat status?
This is also why there is a type of book called (in industry lingo) the "paperback originals." That's when the first release is paperback and there never is a hardcover.
I hope this effort make it to paperback so I may have an opportunity to discover a new author - you!
It's standard operating procedure in publishing. I imagine it's pretty much to not canabalize hardcover sales, so the same reason that movie studios release movies in theaters first and then sell to streaming networks 6 months later (in pre-COVID times at least). Or why video games sell for more initially, then get cheaper on steam later. You hope the biggest fans buy first?
There's also a promotional benefit with books though because you can have a second publicity push when the paperback comes out. So each book gets effectively two releases, in a sense.
My best works are two unpublished novels each in excess of 200k words. I kept a meticulous written record of the 120 (240 total), agent and publisher rejections. When a reason was given it was, “too long.” One agent said they “might take a look at it if it were 85k.” Both manuscripts are what the market calls “historical fiction.” I now write novellas and self publish.