Self-Pubbed Books Shorter?

[Lemurion]

I think part of the reason is just that self-publishing offers an outlet for those c.30-50k stories that aren't really publishable through the big houses.

There are people who like to buy them, and others who enjoy reading them, but it's just not a marketable length for many publishers. The end result is most of these books end up self-published because that's the best choice for them.

[Atunah]

Originally Posted by Waylander

Interesting replies. I just notices a trend in the self-pubbed books I have bought recently, in that most of them are shorter than the equivalent trad-pubbed book. I don't have any data to go on, just personal experience, so was interested in other readers' experiences.

You are not alone in noticing this to some extent. I think part of this is genre. I read a lot of romance and the contemporary romances that are put out often by self publishers are very short. I see often pages counts of 140 listed as books. Those are even shorter than Harlequins category lines, the booklets at the checkout counters. Not all are that short, but many of them are.

There are also a lot more novellas in romance put out by self publishers.
Of course every time I read on the boards they hang out, its all about how to pump out more product. Pump it out, pump it out. 1 a month. So of course, they get shorter so they can pump em out.
Many admit they like writing shorter stuff so they can have more product.

And I am not even talking about 600 page trade books. That is pretty long. For me average length books are 300-450 pages. I never seen this padding some are talking about. Of course I only hear that term when some are trying to explain the shorter SP stuff. I just want a full rounded story with full rounded characters.

That is not saying a 200 page book can't be satisfying. It depends, often they feel a bit shallow and abrupt. I don't really consider anything much below 200 pages a book though.

I think there is this idea that readers are having shorter attention span and all that and reading on their phones. I don't know. Yet most of the readers I hang out, still read and want regular length books. I think there is a market for all of them. Meaning not all books need to be shorter and shorter is not better. And not all books need to be 400 + pages either. They can all co-exist. There are readers for both.

But yes, I have noticed overall the books are getting shorter with self publishers than the trade counterparts.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by DrNefario

I welcome the return of shorter books, myself.

I kind of feel that the trend over the last 30 years or so has been for ever longer books, partly because the technology of managing those books has become more workable and partly to justify price rises, and it's kind of nice that books no longer have to look thick on the shelf, however genuine that actually is.

There is also the decline in editing in the wake of the mergers and downsizing.
A lot of books, especially from established authors with nary a question on structure and padding. In the olden days many a publisher paid by the word and by Wotan those books got *edited*.

[saoir]

Originally Posted by Waylander

I've noticed that on the whole most self-published books I look at are often shorter than 300 pages, and hardly ever go beyond 400 pages. 500 pages and up is a rare find indeed. Does anyone have an idea why there is this possible trend? On the other hand, most trad-pubbed books are often 400 pages and up, although I assume that is down to the economics of mass printing?

I can only say that the eBook I have just self published is >90,000 words. Is that big enough ?

[crich70]

I think it comes down to what the publisher's put in vs what they expect to get out of it. By having writers have a higher word count it makes it more economical for the publisher to print x many copies and sell them at a given price. I mean would you pay $5.99 for a 50 page booklet? Probably not, but if the same author writes a book that's 200 + pages then you start to get some good value for your money. ie. You get more while seemingly paying less. it's like when you buy 5 bars of soap and get the 6th for free. You really don't get a free bar of soap. They just recalculate the price and divide it by 6 instead of 5. But you pay less per bar and think you are getting a good deal. With electronic publishing though there is less cost to everyone as the book goes from writer to publication. I mean you don't have to pay postage to mail it in, the publisher doesn't have to pay for ink or paper or the workers salaries as they are printed etc. and a 500 page novel and a 25 page book weigh just the same on an ereader.

[7hir7een]

Funny, a high percentage of the self-published books I've read have been unnecessarily long.

I often feel the stories could benefit from cutting out the superfluous bulk. I'd rather novels be lean than long and full of passages that don't add to the story.

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by 7hir7een

Funny, a high percentage of the self-published books I've read have been unnecessarily long.

I often feel the stories could benefit from cutting out the superfluous bulk. I'd rather novels be lean than long and full of passages that don't add to the story.

I see that too, as well as the shorter ones. Going self-pub gives you more options for length, so you'll find both longer and shorter books.

[Phogg]

Walter Gibson's Shadow stories generally ran around 130 pages.
Not every story type works well stretched out.

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by Phogg

Walter Gibson's Shadow stories generally ran around 130 pages.
Not every story type works well stretched out.

That's one reason I'm self-pubbing the series I'm working on right now. They owe more to Doc Savage than the Shadow, but they're still coming in at a similar length. Pulp adventures don't need to be long.

[Pulpmeister]

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.

[Graham]

Count me in the camp that welcomes the return of 200 page books. You can tell a cracking good story - with depth - in that space.

If it needs more, by all means add more, but so many of even the 300+ page books have unnecessary padding. They'd be better without it.

Graham

[Geralt]

Average book page for me this year is above 400 pages according to Goodreads. I read fantasy and 90% of that genre are big books around 700 and above. But with occasional science fiction that number dropped in my stats.

I don't read self-published works, but imo, in fantasy at least you need 500-600 pages to really develop the characters and do some solid world building. This is especially true for epic fantasy I think. In urban fantasy, things are usually faster paced so you don't need that much and series are longer, they are not usually trilogies as is the case with epic so you have more books to do the same.

That being said, there's a lot of fluffing and buffing in fantasy, because there is a certain expectation by the publishers. So you do get a lot of books that could have been shorter, that have a simple story line, but are nonetheless inflated to 700 pages.

[DrNefario]

Yeah, I think the big books are only really needed if you have many viewpoint characters, and how many of them are actually crucial? I think it's just a habit of that style.

Even then you get into WoT/SoIaF situations where nothing seems to happen in a whole 800 page book because there are so many characters they still don't get enough room to do anything.

[Catlady]

I'm thinking of the quote from Pascal (paraphrased), This letter is so long because I didn't have the time to make it short.

More editing and polishing generally means fewer words.

[saoir]

Originally Posted by Pulpmeister

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.

I stopped reading Clancy several years ago for similar reasons. Endless monotonous technical background that contributed nothing to the plot or enjoyment of the story. I think a huge number of men buy his books based on the films and then abandon them half way through. I know many who have done this.
To me it's cheating. It just adds up to doing a huge amount of research, probably done by someone else anyway, and including it in what is basically a very ordinary story of very modest length ... turning it into a monster book that is trying to pose as a serious piece of work based on it's poundage alone.