Quote:
Originally Posted by Mayzshon
Somewhat off-topic but:
One other thing I've noticed is that what is an acceptable length for a novel is getting longer. I've picked up a couple of 1950's spy thrillers from the used bookstore, and they came in at around 160 pages (roughly 60,000 words). Compare that to today when books are routinely 500 pages or more, but with the same amount of story.
|
I've noticed that over the years, and frankly, I haven't been happy with it. I find the padding -- and that's really all it is -- tends to slow down the story. Instead of a clean, spare novel focusing on action, we get something reminiscent of the old Russian novels that take ten pages to dissect a character's thoughts of a moment. I don't want to read the same events from five different characters' viewpoints, either. What's wrong with having a protagonist and sticking with him or her though the book?
The problem I'm seeing is that books are getting thicker, but stories aren't. Either they're still telling the same story, just using twice as many words to do it, or they're sticking in bits of other stories to pad out the word count, and in the process distracting readers from the stories they're actually telling. Robert E. Howard's classic
Hour of the Dragon -- the only Conan novel -- was 72,659 words. Fantasy novels today run from 120,000 to 160,000 words ... yet I would dispute that their authors are twice as good as REH. I got started thinking about this when I was wondering why my reading speed had slowed down so greatly since I was in high school -- I could read a SF novel in a few hours, then, and now it takes me twice as long. I realized I was still reading at the same speed -- I didn't have some mysterious reading problem -- but I was reading twice as many words for the same results.
So, when it comes to an ebook, the proper length is "as long as it needs to be, but no longer." Without publisher-imposed limitations on physical dimensions, there's no reason for something in electronic format to be anything else.