Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Tradpubs pay a lot of attention to word counts and they play a lot of games with fonts, margins, and spacing to bulk up (or thin out) their print volumes.
Conversely, Indies tend to tell a story and let it run as long as it needs to.
Which is to say, if you're worried about story length, look to the word count and d/l size, not the nominal page count.
|
Yes, partly. But for indies, there is also the fact that we can sell a book cheaper (in print) if we can keep the page count DOWN. So even though, for example, I may write a book at 85k words which is a fairly average wordcount for urban fantasy or mysteries, I'm going to use a smaller font if possible and not do things like waste space at the top of each chapter. The standard paperback from a trad publisher starts new chapters halfway down the page. By minimizing that type of waste, I can get less pages--and bring the cost I have to charge readers down.
I actually reformatted most of my initial books to shrink the pages used because saving 10 to 30 pages can really reduce the cost. I was able to lower the price of all the Sedona books by 2 to 4 dollars just by changing the font and spacing. (Same with some of the other books in print).
That said, genre matters in page count too. Fantasy and sci/fi are notorious for longer books in general. Cozy mysteries are generally shorter than even regular mysteries or thrillers. Romance can vary from as short as 50k to nearly 100k and still be considered a full novel.
There are a LOT of authors, trad and indie, putting out novellas and short stories right now. Publishers are asking authors to do it because it keeps the author's name out there. Indies do it for the same reason. When the standard time between books is a year, having a short story or novella out can make a huge difference in sales of the previous book and the next one coming out.