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Old 09-26-2008, 03:53 PM   #24
DMcCunney
New York Editor
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bill_mchale View Post
I know I am coming in on this thread late, but I think this is a really good point... and its far worse in Fantasy than Science Fiction. Novels are getting longer and yet the writers often still are not finishing the book in 500+ pages... I think the original Foundation Trilogy that Asimov wrote probably comes in a hair under 700 pages and he spans 300 years or so in that series.
25 or 30 years ago, the dynamic was the opposite. Appropriate length for a novel was about 60 - 70 thousand words, and writers turning out longer manuscripts were often asked to trim to fit. Longer books meant higher production costs, as additional signatures were required, and would require higher prices (at a time when publishers were trying to keep PB prices under a dollar.) Back then, the dominant format for SF/fantasy was the mass market paperback. Not many hardcovers got released, and many that were were intended for the library market. Doubleday's SF hardcover program was an example: their contract specified they got half the proceeds of a PB sale. So the library sales covered their direct costs, and the half of the PB sale provided their profit.

As time passed and the book industry evolved, those considerations changed and books started getting longer. You did still see pressure to cut to fit, and some large books got issued as two paperbacks due to technical limitations on how big a PB could be. (I recommended Dan Simmon's _Hyperion_ to a friend. Bantam produced as two PB volumes, but didn't indicates on the first one it was part one of two. A friend read the first one, ran into the metaphorical brick wall of the cliffhanger ending, and was so incensed he refused to read anything else by Simmons. My comments that it wasn't Simmons' fault if his publisher was an idiot were to no avail.)

Quote:
I think the big problem these days is that Publishers would prefer sell a few big books than a lot of small books. The pre-production costs (i.e. designing the cover, editing, etc,) are probably not that much more for a 400 page book than for a 200 page book, and then of course regardless of size, marketing costs are the same. And naturally, its hard to sell a 200 page book for the same price as a 500 page book. Add to the fact that they can probably fairly reliably predict how well the sequels of a book will perform based off of the sales of the first book... and I think it is easy to see that the publishing houses are encouraging the longer and longer books.
They'd like to sell a lot of books, period. Pre-production costs are roughly the same for a short book or a long one, but manufacturing costs aren't. Bigger books have more pages and require more paper, and paper costs are a major factor in pricing.

But in general, the market seems to prefer longer books, and wants a series rather than a stand-alone. Authors doing stand-alones tend to see lower sales for those titles than for books in a series.

Quote:
Actually, ebooks, with the potential of self publishing, or at least lower production costs could bring back the relatively short stand alone novel.. as well as the Novella and the short story.... after all, they can all have the same web presence as the 1000 page book.
Yes, you can produce an ebook in pretty much any length. The trick is selling it.

Self-published ebook authors are discovering what pbook authors have long known: writing it is the easy part. Selling it is another matter. You must devote far more time and effort to promoting yourself and your work, and letting your intended audience know you exist, than you do to actually write the book and produce the electronic edition.

I had dinner last night with a friend who is a published author, with ten books (a couple under pseudonyms) in print, and several more under contract and in progress. She devotes time and effort to figuring out which conventions and other functions to attend, based on whether she can reach new groups of readers not familiar with her or her work. While her publishers are happy with her sales, she's not at the point where they'll spring for kiosk ads and send her around on signing tours. Unless you are a bestselling author, promotion is on you.
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