Quote:
Originally Posted by mrscoach
I noticed long ago that most paperbacks were the same length, give or take a small amount. Come on, surely all stories and all authers aren't the same and don't require the same length.
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There's an interesting comment by Charles Stross in the afterword of his new collection
Wireless:
“Palimpsest” wanted to be a novel. It really, really wanted to be a novel. Maybe it will be, someday. And maybe I could have gotten away with making it a short novel, just to round out this collection with an example of every format of fiction, if it wasn’t for the imaginary voice of my editor nagging at the back of my head (“Do you know how much it costs to print a hardcover once it goes over five hundred pages?”). Part of the reason novels are the length they are is the cost of printing and binding. Binding a fat book is disproportionately more expensive than binding two thinner ones, and there is a downward pressure on the price of hardbacks, which makes it difficult for publishers to show a profit on a fat volume. No surprise, then, that many recent big fat fantasy novels have shown up split into two or more thinner volumes.
Perhaps once publishing moves wholesale onto the Internet, fashions in fiction length and the disappearance of printing and binding costs will lead to more and longer novels: but in the here and now, this short-story collection is pushing the limits of what I can get away with, without any need to add another hundred thousand words!"
I didn't know that one 1,000 page book cost more to print than two 500 page ones. I do know the awkwardness of 1,000+ page MMP copy of a book, though.