Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. Drib
To recap:
What I am looking for is a stand-alone novel that in-and-of-itself comprises a large number of pages, preferably 1000-plus pages.
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I know several (not many-many, but several) good fanfics of that length. I don't know any indie novels of that length.
There's no profit in it; you can't (effectively) charge three times as much for a thousand-page novel as you can for a 350-page novel. So indie novelists are better off splitting their long stories into two or three roughly-equal parts, making sure each one has something of an ending (not particularly hard to do; Tolkien managed fine), and selling them as three books in a series instead of a novel. People will buy 3 books at $5 each more readily than they'll buy one at $15.
Traditional publishers have the option of paying authors of very long novels a higher advance, and promoting those novels to get more sales; indie authors are working with a different set of dynamics. Extra-long books cost a *lot* more as PoD; indie authors don't have the economy of scale that allows for $10 or $12 paperbacks of over 1000 pages.
So while there are indeed stories indie authors that are more than a quarter-million words long, those stories tend to be split into multiple volumes for the purpose of sales.
Except, of course, in the fanfic genre, where sales are not a motivating factor in release length.