Charlie Stross on SF/Fantasy word count

Saint Fool · Dec 29, 2008

Charlie Stross writes about word count in SF/Fantasy and mysteries.

{quote]It's a question that comes up quite often — back in the 1960s a typical SF novel ran to 60,000 words (130-150 pages); one that topped 80,000 words was considered lengthy. But today, I'm more or less required by contract to hand in 100,000 word novels; and some of them are considerably longer. (At 145,000 words, "Accelerando" would have been considered a whopper back in the 1970s.) So what happened?[/quote]

It's an interesting read concerning book distribution and how it has changed from the mid 20th century causing SF to get fatter. (Folks in the comments come up with other explanations for the change.) Stross theorizes that now SF readers have been "trained" to expect fatter books. And then he raises the question of why haven't mysteries also gotten thicker. (Although in the comments, a mystery writer states that he's been asked to up his word count to 80-90,000 by his publisher.)

And then there's this fun factoid:

A different editor of my acquaintance observed that whenever one of her novelists switched to word processing, the average length of their books increased by about 10%.

Dommo · Dec 29, 2008

Well, shorter books are a let down for me. If I'm spending like 8 dollars on a book, I'd like for it to take me longer than 2 hours to read. I read about 100-120 pages/hr, and when books are only like 150 pages, it's hard for me to justify the cost from an entertainment perspective. I figure there's probably a lot of other consumers like me that are voracious readers and kind of like a book to be thick.

Secondly, technology definitely plays a role. Typewriters suck to work with, and a person who can type well can lay down words pretty quickly. Hypothetically if a person could type a "perfect" novel(no editing or anything), at a 100 wpm, it'd only take a person like 17 hours to write a 100,000 word novel. Thus, if we kind of extrapolate someone who's on a writing frenzy and has an editor who's willing to look at their book, I could see a novel being able to be pumped out in a month's time. Raw manuscript to product.

That's a lot different than back in the 60's where spell check didn't exist(which often fixes a lot of the little typo's like writing teh for the), and typewriters don't exactly allow a person to easily edit what they write on the fly. I guess it could be argued that this has lowered the quality of the writing produces, which I suppose makes sense because word processors sort of lower the barrier of entry into writing.

Charlie Stross on SF/Fantasy word count

Saint Fool

Dommo

On Mac's double secret probation.