Quote:
Originally Posted by Russell Brooks
Isn't it amazing how established authors can afford to make mistakes that new authors could never get away with?
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I agree with you that certain authors get "too big for their editors" (such as Stephen King) but to be fair to Anne Rice (who definitely falls in this category), Interview with the Vampire was one of her earliest works. Possibly her earliest big success, although I don't know for sure. But her later books do get longer and longer.
I do wonder if ebooks are actually going to make the long book problem even worse. After all, there is a physical constraint to how many pages a book will hold, before the binding falls apart. Surely some editor must have said to Diana Gabaldon or Ken Follett, "we need to cut 100,000 words or the book will be too big to bind." With ebooks, there is no such physical constraint. Will there be "author's cuts" like there are "director's cuts" for movies? Or will some books just get really, really long? To me, it's not a good thing: a good editor with a red pen is important to the best of writers.
eP