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Word bloat isn't unique to self-published books. I recently worked my way through one of the late Tom Clancy's more recent titles, "The Teeth of the Tiger." At the end of the 600+ pages (around 150,000 words) I discovered that this was just the first half of the story. So the total length would be around 300,000 words, assuming Part 2 is about the same size.
Now the plot is a basic one: someone does you wrong, and you bring them down one by one. The same basic plot as, for example, "Man on Fire," 95,000 words for the entire story, and a better book, too. Or "Brought in Dead" (1967), by Jack Higgins, a crisp 50,000 words.
Clancy's techno-thrillers do require a fairly high word count because of the detail and complexity of the action taking place ("Hunt for Red October"; "Red Storm Rising") but a straight-forward thriller, which is what "Teeth of the Tiger" is, loses a lot if the story is too bloated out with needless padding.
It takes a whopping 350 pages of the 600 to get to the critical action which sets off the retaliation trail (a terrorist shopping mall massacre); easily 250 to 300 pages too many. And then, when the hunt is on, endless pages are filled in with superfluous detail. A simple journey down Italy from one action scene to another takes many pages when a straightforward jump cut would have been far better.
Indeed, a sharp thriller writer would have started with the massacre as Chapter 1, ( as Higgins did), flashed back to explain how the heroes got involved, as Chapter 2, then had the baddies, back in wherever they were, talk over the results and back-grounding how it was done and why, as Chapter 3, and then, at page 75 at the very latest, the chase is on.
I haven't read the second half; the sheer bloat of the first half discouraged me. I suppose, in the end, both Clancy and his editors felt that his fans need big, fat books, even if it involves endless padding. Or perhaps his editors weren't game to tell Mr Clancy to write more tightly.
And if you don't have someone editing your books and telling you bluntly that you have too much bloat, (and many self-publishers don't have editors), you can easily finish up with an over-inflated book.
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