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Old 05-09-2019, 02:20 AM   #12
Pulpmeister
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Join Date: Nov 2011
Location: Perth Western Australia
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I regard word count as the only usable guide to ebook length. Provided of course the publisher doesn't include pages of promo for other books in the count. The physical size of a printed book is sometimes misleading too: thickish paper, wide margins, increased 'leading" (line spacing) and even blank pages between chapters, can bulk up an average book into a commercially acceptable doorstop. The opposite was true during WW2 and the paper shortage. Narrow margins, thin paper, and tiny type reduced a doorstop to a slim volume.

Some authors always wrote "short": the Perry Mason series by Erle Stanley Gardner typically ran to 50,000 words or less per book. Maigret novels are in the same zone. Penguin used to publish them two at a time, bringing the book up to a commercially respectable 80-90,000 words.

Christie as mentioned can be as short as 60,000 words. In her autobiography she notes that she personally preferred about 45,000 words but her publisher wouldn't hear of it. "So I added a second murder..."

There was a time where an action novel, eg Bagley or Innes or early Jack Higgins or Alistair Maclean, was 80,000-ish, but now publishers demand 100,000 words plus for that genre, as Lee Child has noted. Higgins' later novels are bulked up to fit this editorial requirement.

Sometimes when I post a book in the Library here, I note in the blurb if it as an unusual word length.
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