Two Worlds, Not Alike at All
6th March 2019
Sarah Hoyt casts an eye over the book trade.
If you go back and read Burroughs, say, you’ll find that he was not a particularly good writer on the word level. What he was was a great storyteller, often by violating every known rule, including telling you a vast amount of how things should be, instead of showing how they were. But it worked, and obviously he was to the taste of his contemporaries.
What I see in indie is, weirdly, like a return to the old days of pulp. Novels are shorter. They start somewhere around 30k and usually top out at 50k. An 80k word book is rare, and 100k plus very rare.
The reason for this actually makes sense. The change in book length was driven, more than anything, by the need to make a book large enough to sell for $5 — later $8 — dollars for a paperback. They could fudge it some. A friend who did very well never could write more than 65k, but her books were printed with larger type. But less than that? no.
So, books are returning to the size that most people can consume at one sitting or in an afternoon.
I remember those days. Books would max out at around 300 pages (if you were lucky) and stories would move pretty briskly. You weren’t left after the first 100 pages wondering when a story was going to start.