Charles Stross (in my opinion the best SF and fantasy author currently working) has an excellent blog, and this month he's been posting some must-read items. Here's one: Why books are the length they are. Excerpt:
Many earlier novels are still deceptively short by modern standards. A typical SF novel of the 1960s was 70,000 words long. By the 1980s, 80,000 words was the norm; by the 1990s it had bloated to 100-120,000 words.
Why? One account I've heard (from an editor who was active throughout this period) is that it was the distributors. The mass market for paperbacks prior to 1991 was dominated by wholesalers who supplied retail stores — not bookshops, but local supermarkets with wire-mesh book racks.
The wholesalers knew their markets intimately, and would match mass-market titles to the supermarket customers on the basis of their clientelle — SF/F was popular near technical schools, for example.
When the inflation of the 1970s and 1980s forced publishers to raise their cover prices, the distributors pushed back and demanded that if the product cost more, it had to be bigger — not taller or wider, else it wouldn't fit the racks, but fatter. (They were, after all, primarily in the grocery business rather than the book trade. You want to charge more for that lettuce? It better be bigger!)You'll find a link to his blog in the Writers' Blogs and Sites list in the left-hand column.
Comments