Books are Getting Significantly Longer Every Year

[Apache]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Getting longer since when, though?

I very much enjoy reading 19th century literature, and 19th century novels were, on average, much, much longer than the typical modern novel, typically being published in three volumes so that three people could borrow the book from the library (the average person's main source of books in 19th century Britain) at the same time. Eight out of Dickens's fifteen novels are over 300,000 words, for example.

Clearly, therefore, novels became considerably shorter before they started getting longer again (eg the typical Agatha Christie novel is around 50,000 words), and even today a 300,000-word novel would be regarded as something of a "blockbuster".

It would seem, therefore, to be something of a cyclic phenomenon, perhaps?

Sorry,
I should have added that I was talking about US publishers mostly in the 1950's through the 1970's.
Apache

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

The second ones are "I have a degree so my books are perfectly written."

Personal opinion on those two is the first one is probably right because they won't get readers.
The second one, yes each sentence is grammatically perfect but do they make sense together.

Those are usually the ones that say 50 shades is badly written. It is not badly written, it is just simplistic writing.

Literary snobs.

But I think the usual complaint against the unmentionable... thing... is not so much that it is badly written, but that it's mere existence is an offense against good taste.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by Apache

Sorry,
I should have added that I was talking about US publishers mostly in the 1950's through the 1970's.
Apache

For the most part, novels appeared first in magazines from the 50's through the 70's, thus shorter books were preferred. That's how most authors got paid back then. The actual book sales were fairly small for anyone other than a major author.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

For the most part, novels appeared first in magazines from the 50's through the 70's, thus shorter books were preferred. That's how most authors got paid back then. The actual book sales were fairly small for anyone other than a major author.

Interestingly, though, magazine or "serial" publication was also the norm for 19th century novels, and this was precisely the reason that many of them were so long: keeping them going was a money-spinner for both the author and the publisher. Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and Thomas Hardy all published their novels first in magazines, while on the other side of the Atlantic, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry James did the same. One of the most extreme examples is "The Count of Monte Cristo", which Alexandre Dumas stretched out to 139 episodes!

One of the advantages of serial publication was that an author could change the direction the story was taking in response to public reaction as the serial was being published. Dickens did this a lot.

[Fbone]

Do we know how much Dickens was paid per word?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Fbone

Do we know how much Dickens was paid per word?

He wasn't. See:

http://dickens.ucsc.edu/resources/faq/by-the-word.html

[DiapDealer]

It's just a cyclical thing like Harry mentioned.
(not to mention that any "study" which uses page-count to measure the "length" of a book is just plain stupid to begin with)

[Cinisajoy]

Ok I can think of a book that was nearly 300 pages long and the word count was way less than 10,000 words.
I saw a book recently that the book was 1000 pages long with a 6 point font. That word count is 645,000.
I just looked that one up.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Interestingly, though, magazine or "serial" publication was also the norm for 19th century novels, and this was precisely the reason that many of them were so long: keeping them going was a money-spinner for both the author and the publisher. Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and Thomas Hardy all published their novels first in magazines, while on the other side of the Atlantic, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry James did the same. One of the most extreme examples is "The Count of Monte Cristo", which Alexandre Dumas stretched out to 139 episodes!

One of the advantages of serial publication was that an author could change the direction the story was taking in response to public reaction as the serial was being published. Dickens did this a lot.

Several of those magazines were weekly magazines. Dickens published a number of his novels in magazines where he was the editor. The magazines in the 1800's were very different than the magazines in the 1930's onward. Actually, there are a few authors publishing via Amazon/Kindle who seem to be adopting the weekly serial publishing mode.

I first got into SF&F towards the end of the magazine era. I originally read Zelazny's Hand of Oberon in serial form. I'm pretty sure that the magazines of that time wanted to limit a serialization to a smaller number of issues so they could carry more variety.

[murg]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

It's just a simple matter of evolution. Bugs are getting more crush-resistant.

Especially now that the traditional publications for this purpose, the phone books, are getting not only harder to acquire, but smaller, too.

[BenG]

Genre paperback publishers wanted a short book to keep the price low. Around a dollar or less when I was growing up.

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by HarryT

He wasn't. See:

http://dickens.ucsc.edu/resources/faq/by-the-word.html

By word or by installment it does encourage longer works.

[Pulpmeister]

I read a book of P G Wodehouse's letters to his friend Bill Townend, Performing Flea?, and in the early letters, circa the teens to early 20s of the 20th C, most of his books were serialised first. The fees were staggering, many thousands of dollars when 3 or 4 dollars a day was good money for an ordinary man. He often re-wrote a book which had been serialised, to make it more suitable for hardback. This of course changed as publishing patters changed.

Bill Townend, by the way, was an old school mate of Wodehouse (Dulwich College), and wrote many seafaring adventure novels which seem to have vanished without trace. So does Townend himself. A year or so after Wodehouse and Townend left Dulwich, a youngster called Raymond Chandler began there.

If you can find this book, it's well worth a read. Wodehouse had a very fine eye for technique, and construction, of novels, and his letters to Townend are an education in their own right.

Techno thrillers are naturally going to tend to be wordy, as the author puts in all the technical stuff that he (it's usually a he) enjoys, as does his readership. Unfortunately, sometimes they just get plain bloated. Try "The Teeth of the Tiger" one day (Tom Clancy). The same basic plot as "Man on Fire", or for that matter Jack Higgins "Brought in Dead", both under 100,000 words. But Clancy took 300,000 mind-numbing words. And it was only the first half! A good editor would easily have pruned it down to 100,000 words max, but which editor was going to mess with Clancy?

I've lately been reading the 1960s-70s Matt Helm series, all fast-moving, tightly plotted action stories coming in around 70-80,000 words. No self-indulgence there.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Fbone

By word or by installment it does encourage longer works.

Yes, that's what I said in my earlier post:

...this was precisely the reason that many of them were so long: keeping them going was a money-spinner for both the author and the publisher.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

My Kindle has bigger books than your Kobo.

My H2O does not have War and Peace.