How long should a book be?

[thaddeus6th]

To answer it in a slightly different way, shorter books are becoming more usual and novellas have made a comeback thanks to e-readers.

Even for sci-fi and fantasy, I'd guess 80-100,000 words is the norm. Personally, I don't mind a bigger book (the first two Stormlight Archive stories are enormous).

The general consensus that cutting matters is something I'd agree with. I may be chopping some bits from my current WIP [well, one of them. Actually, now I think of it, two of them]. It's irksome to think of axing something that took time and may be well-written, but that has to be balanced against what works for the book. The story's purpose is to entertain a reader rather than indulge a writer.

I also agree entirely that advice does not have to be followed. But the purpose of beta-readers is to raise potential problems so they can be avoided, and don't appear in reviews.

A while I tried writing a blog about balancing self-confidence and doubt [didn't really work and I lacked time to fiddle with it], but I think that's critical for a writer. You need to have confidence in what you do, and be sensitive enough to take on board criticism without taking it personally. Be a masochist. Enjoy the lash of constructive criticism lashing the body of your work.

Speaking of which, back to the grindstone.

 

[Nick B]

A book should be as long as it needs to be, no more, and no less. Avoid padding. We cut around 10,000 words from Liberator in the end, and it was all the better for it, and sitting at 96k is in the middle of average length for a sci-fi novel. End of the day, if your books are available, sales and reviews should be telling you what you need to know.

 

[Brian G Turner]

But if writers like editors to cut and slash their precious work to pieces, that is down to them.

An editor's job is simply to provide technical advice on how to improve a work. Ultimately, it's up to the writer to decide what changes to apply.

Learning to write more succinctly, and how to keep focus, are valuable skills that are really difficult to learn without trusted feedback.

2c.

 

[Dan Jones]

I believe that everything I put in my books is relevant to the story and the enjoyment of the reader.

I used to think this. I was wrong.

Third party advice will always help you improve. The most important thing I've learned over the last two years is that writing need not be a solitary pursuit; collaboration, knowledge exchange and generally mucking about in the sandpit that is Chrons (or whichever writing group takes your fancy) is invaluable to self-improvement, and also opens up new opportunities.

As for character development needing length, Jo's right. Her books are snappy but her characters are almost close enough to touch. And I'll raise the bar a little further - I just successfully subbed a story just 10k words in length which our very own Teresa Edgerton commended for its depth and arc of character.

So, while 1000 pages might be relevant for our book, you should at least entertain the idea that it might not. Even if it's just to prove that you're right.

And welcome to Chrons!

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Advice is always welcome, Jo. I don't suggest at all that it is cool to write long books. But if writers like editors to cut and slash their precious work to pieces, that is down to them. I believe that everything I put in my books is relevant to the story and the enjoyment of the reader. I love advice and respect what people have to say. But I don't necessary have to take it on board. If you suspect by my original question that I doubt myself as a writer, than you are entirely wrong. I love reading thick sci-fi books and I like to think there are other readers out there like me.

Ah - my 2nd post also explained that my editors have all extended my books. It's not about length, actually, but about what is needed, what might not be and, crucially, what might be missing. And, yes, my editors see what i cannot.

 

[Wawona Girl]

An editor's job is simply to provide technical advice on how to improve a work. Ultimately, it's up to the writer to decide what changes to apply.

Learning to write more succinctly, and how to keep focus, are valuable skills that are really difficult to learn without trusted feedback.

2c.

Brian, I think you put it the best. While an editor provides advice, an author needs to sum up how qualified he or she is to give that advice. A stunning website does not a printing company or editor make. At the end of the day, it is the author who should decide what changes apply to their work. All the same, there is no disputing that feedback is valuable.

 

[The Big Peat]

687 pages is, personally speaking, not a comfortable number of pages for a book. It might be the *right* number but it is not a comfortable number.

I have read books of that length and longer before - I used to consume them avidly - and I will do so again. But having done so for so long I'm am now somewhat leery of getting involved in books of that length. It is not that I dislike reading that length of story but rather that I now associate it with sloppy storytelling. I have seen too many writers who I respect immensely put out curates' eggs when doing massive books to think otherwise. The likelihood that every event in the story is needful seems very small. So too is the likelihood that the story couldn't have been split up into smaller books. Big books feel more about publisher economics and authorial vanity than sensible storytelling.

So when I see 687 pages these days, I am wary. I am not comfortable assuming that the quality will be there. I require that little bit more selling that it will be a good book. I require a fairly substantial amount of selling that it is will be a good series. I've put down Song of Ice and Fire; I no longer recommend Wheel of Time whole-heartedly. A new sprawling epic writer has to convince me they're going to do better than Martin and Jordan. That's difficult.

I can't blame any author who wants to try and go there. I do too. But sympathy with their aims does not equal comfort with their aims; 9 times out of 10, the right length for a book is short of a great Jordan-esque epic.

 

[Juliana]

I am a very, very lean writer

So am I; my first drafts are never long enough. But then I'm always very conscious of story size when writing, as I write YA and that's a different beastie than epic fantasy. (A friend with a big $ YA contract at a big publishing house actually had a size clause included by the publisher in her contract for her second book saying it couldn't be over 80k!)

As a reader, it really depends on my mood. I like a long book, but these days, with so much out there that I want to read, a long book needs to 'deserve' the length. For instance, I'll always make time to read a new Stormlight!! Would I pick up a massive book by a writer I haven't tried before? I might, if it sounds my sort of thing and if it's been highly recommended. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't. Simply because I have so much already on my to-read list.

 

[Elvraie]

Hello Wawona!
I read China Mieville books which, for some of them, are quite big and I was never bored.
I think, short or large, a book must have a balance of descriptions (world building) which are not overlong. Often a few carefully constructed sentences do the trick, characterisation (Very important, but too much would make your book a bit literary, which in my opinion is not a bad thing.) and action. The style is also primordial, but that is acquired with time and practice.
I'm writing a novel which would be about 260 pages, which is quite short, as I have written books twice that big and another one, which needs many rereadings, 1060 pages. Also, I find useful to write short stories, (10-20 pages) as with a few carefully chosen words, you can evoke quite a lot, establish a mood and describe characters with a few sentences. That could be applied for bigger work, too.

 

[Extollager]

For what one reader's opinion is worth--I generally take it as a bad sign if I open a long book and find it is full of dialogue. I won't say that good dialogue is easy to write, but dialogue is easy to write, and in this word processor era it's particularly easy to go on and on thus; and authors do.

This problem precedes the word processor era, btw. I have read many of Rider Haggard's books, and I seemed to notice that, with the passing of the years, as he dictated his books he indulged in expanses of dialogue (e.g. in When the World Shook).

 

[2DaveWixon]

A book should be as long as it needs to be.

However - it is really difficult to learn to be tough enough to butcher out all the unnecessary parts. Really long stories may be longer than they need to be, but it'll take third-party input to point that out.

Shucks, Brian beat me to the line (I would have put it as "just long enough").

The hard part is, how do you learn to tell? (But the answer may be that it's too hard for almost every author, for authors see their works as their children -- well, there may be a couple of exceptions. That's where the best editors earn their money.)

 

[VinceK]

I wrote a 130,000 word sci-fi novel and was advised by an editor to shorten it as it was too long for a debut submission. I couldn't hack away at the main plot so it meant removing characters and sub-plots, all 35,000 words of them.

 

[2DaveWixon]

Okay--I don't know your work, so don't take this personally. But I for one have a prejudice against long new books. I grew up in the days when an Ace Science Fiction Special was around 160-220 pages, by masters like Le Guin and Simak, and when the classics in Ballantine's Fantasy series were almost all around 250 pages or less. (William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land and William Morris's The Well at the World's End were published in two volumes, but still at no more than 400-500 pages or so.) Very rare was the book that needed to be long--Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. Thus it sure takes some convincing for me to believe that all these wallowing 600-page-per-volume sf "series" need to be anything like the length they are; or that, if they do, that that is the kind of fiction I want to read. It's not that I shy away from long books per se; I love LOTR, and, to venture out of genre fiction, love The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace. But I'm apt to regard a big new book with suspicion. Since authors started writing with word processors and editors became acquisitions agents, books have been getting Too Long!

And (I hope I don't give offense) when you say you love your characters, that rings an alarm bell with me.

Sincere best wishes.

At this point, I will admit that there are times when I want a book to be longer than it is...that happens when the author had made a work and world that has drawn me deeply inside... But there are also books where I find myself getting impatient for the end.
Unless the author is well known to the reader, there's no way the reader can tell that in advance.

 

[Juliana]

was advised by an editor to shorten it as it was too long for a debut submission

There's that too, as Vince says. So a lot depends on the writer's intention for their work. Do they want to sub it to agents/publishers? Are they happy to self-pub but want lots of sales and readers? Or are they happy just to have a few readers and mainly have it out there for themselves? I say this because different goals mean different approaches. If a writer wants to be trad published, then a huge debut novel will almost certainly put agents and editors off.

 

[thaddeus6th]

That's a very good point, Juliana.

 

[zaltys13]

Hey, I welcome your thoughts. I take no offence.

But any person can write a story and give their characters names, before taking them on a wild roller coaster ride. But why read a book like that? Unless characters have depth, than the reader isn't going to give a toss whether they live or die. Men are excellent at writing at length about complex technology, I find. Women are excellent at writing about people. A bestseller happens when you get a fine balance between how men and women write. JK Rowling has it. So does Steven King and Clive Cussler. Although don't get me started on how the style of his writing has changed over the years due to co-writing with other authors. PLease......
I write space opera. It has everything thrown in the pot. And I mean everything. My characters are like family to me. They have survived books 1 & 2. Book 3 is seeing them soar to new horizons. Book 4 needs editing and book 5 is already started. I admit I take no prisoners. I am merely trying to compete with War and Peace.

Sorry but I wouldn't try and compete with War and Peace or any other novel.

 

[TheDustyZebra]

Brian, I think you put it the best. While an editor provides advice, an author needs to sum up how qualified he or she is to give that advice. A stunning website does not a printing company or editor make. At the end of the day, it is the author who should decide what changes apply to their work. All the same, there is no disputing that feedback is valuable.

You need to decide how qualified the editor is before you hire them, not after they say something you don't like. If you've done due diligence and chosen an editor whose work you respect, then you need to give credence to their suggestions. You absolutely do not have to follow the editor's advice (unless you're with a publisher who requires it), but if you aren't going to accept most of their advice, don't waste their (and your) time from the start. The editor is fresh eyes on your work, representing a reasonable sample of what the reader will see, and it does no good to simply ignore that and justify your every word from the point of view of a person who knows stuff about the story that the reader won't.

Everyone else has already answered the original question -- a book should be as long as it needs to be. No more, no less.

That said, when the teacher would assign a paper to be written, and all the other kids said, "How long does it have to be?", I was the kid who said, "How long can it be?" But more is not always better.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Back when I sold my first book to a publisher (my apologies to those who have already heard this story a few times before) my editor asked me to cut 10,000 words from my story.

This was the oldest science fiction and fantasy imprint in the US and had launched many successful writers as well as award-winning editors and editors who had gone on to head their own prestigious imprints, so it was a company with a long history that had gained a great deal of respect, but boy were they cheap when it came to paper and ink! So when my editor said I was supposed to cut about 10% of the book -- not for artistic reasons, not because it was wordy or the pace was slow, but they just didn't like to publish books over 100,000 words because they were too expensive to print* -- I was understandably upset. I was supposed to gut my book to save them money? How could I bear to do it?

But I was new, I was grateful they were publishing my book, I wanted to be cooperative, so instead of digging in my heels and refusing I set my mind to figuring out the best way to do what my editor asked. The easy way would have been to cut out whole scenes or eliminate sub-plots, and I think now that in the case of that particular book it would have been sloppy and the story would have suffered greatly had I done it that way, but what I did was look for places where I could take out a few words here and there, an unnecessary sentence, a paragraph I could condense without losing anything important. Once I really got started it was easier than I expected. When I was through, I did a word count to see if I needed to cut still more, and found to my astonishment that I had not only reached the goal but surpassed it. It was amazing how those small, small changes added up. I had cut 12,000 words. I had cut all that, hadn't gutted the book at all, nothing important was missing, and although I had sacrificed a few little things I liked, that was offset by the fact that incidentally I had improved the pace in several places. even though that wasn't the goal.

More than a quarter of a century later, here is what I know: There are always, always trade-offs when you revise. You sacrifice one thing and another gets better. You fix something and create a new problem elsewhere. You change a scene or a line of dialogue in one chapter, and suddenly several things in later chapters come together in a completely better way than they were before. It can be amazing and wonderful, or it can be awful and soul-destroying. And which of the two it becomes depends largely on whether you decide to approach things with an open mind and a determination to find creative solutions, or you decide to be stubborn and sullen.

If you are a writer like Jo whose prose is very lean, being asked to trim it down would probably be a disaster. But the denser your prose the easier it is to cut out a seemingly impossible number of words and even you won't miss them.


_____
*This was long ago. I imagine they became more generous with word counts later.

 

[BAYLOR]

If the book is well written and keeps me engaged, then length doesn't really matter.

 

[BigBadBob141]

How long should a book be?
It's a bit like saying how long is a piece of string?