Page counts of books dropping?

Pencrafter said:

I’ve been hearing that books that sell, or which are accepted for publication are trending downward in page count. While 400+ for certain types of books used to be common, 250 is more the norm now.

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Page count doesn't really mean anything without word count.

And...although I suspect it differs by genre, my experience has been the opposite. When I was growing up, it wasn't uncommon to find science fiction books at 60-70K. These days 90-120K is considered typical.

I have read surveys suggesting people are reading less, but I think that's a separate phenomenon.

The popularity of long books and book series peaked. That peak correlated with binge behavior. If I see a presentation or discussion on the shift, I'll try to drop that info here.

My guess is consumers are burning out from binging the past several years. Self-sublishers and editors might be looking to save money with smaller wordcounts that will sell as well as a 600-page book did years ago.

The shift is advangeous to those of us who enjoy reading and writing short stories, including flash fiction. I've been hearing that anthology sales are rising (where they can be seen).

As an aside, I think it's interesting you compared microfiction to an elevator speech. The contrast between the two seems important: one is a story and one is a statement about a story. I can't think of example of every mixing up those two forms.

Pencrafter said:

I do not have any data about this; only comments about the state of publishing.

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You're probably worrying unnecessarily. Books is books

I’ve been reading mainstream and literary fiction for decades, and get new ARCs regularly, and I’m not seeing a recent downward trend (I know, this is purely anecdotal). While the typical length you cite rings true to me, I also don’t see how a novel of 300-400 pages is inherently insubstantial. Length is not the only factor that matters.

When I was a kid there were more doorstopper best-selling novels, Stephen King and James Michener and Jacqueline Susann and the like, than there are now. But I’m not seeing how the length necessarily translates into greater complexity or quality. It’s just a different model, and acclaimed short literary novels (even novellas, like The Metamorphosis) have existed for a long time. Would Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House be a better book at 500 pages than about 200? I doubt it.

But I could just be sensitive because I write YA and thrillers, which rarely sell at more than 90k words unless the author is well established. I’ve been asked to prune my books to less than 80k, and I think they’re better for it. Genre/category are big factors here; there’s a reason why SFF books and sprawling historicals tend to be longer (world building!).

Page count is meaningless, not only because of the huge influence of ebooks, but because typesetting determines page count in a significant way.

And I'm not seeing a decrease in pages in the fields I read; genre fiction, history and biography, academic works in my fields, and technical books.

One reason page counts started to slide up for genre fiction c. 2000 is that recycled and low-acid paper became both more available and much cheaper.

AW Admin said:

One reason page counts started to slide up for genre fiction c. 2000 is that recycled and low-acid paper became both more available and much cheaper.

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Huh, that’s interesting. Do you know why that would be so? Did a technology change enable it?

Pencrafter said:

I am a designer, and very experienced with type handling, but not with books.

I’d always assumed that books, other than for children, or large-type for people with vision problems, had appx the same type density per page. Dictionaries are an obvious exception.

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They don't, at all. Pick up a bunch of books and look. For a whole slew of reasons, books vary hugely in wpp. There's a general number people use for approximate conversion (250), but it's just a general thing, not in any way specific to any book you might pick up at any time.

Whenever I’m running into space issues, I have wiggle room, but not that much before the type begins to look obviously smaller. Yet there are faces which look “regular” size to the user, but there’s much that can be done with kerning, tracking, font selection..very subtle differences which can have big impact over the course of a book.

I never hear people talk about books’ word counts. They’ll say: “quick read” or, “it was a thick book” — the feeling is that more pages is directly proportional to the amount of stuff for the eyeballs to send to the brain.

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People think in terms of what they know. Readers think about how books look or feel. That's not to do with how many words are actually in them. Plenty of books have significantly smaller (or larger) type )not including large print books)-- there is no standard -- or larger, or larger spacing between lines, or larger or smaller margins on the page, and that's before even thinking about fonts, kerning, etc.

Judging by the page-counts of the books of my favourite authors lately, there's an increase not a decrease... But if I'm going on vacation then I'm definitely picking up a thinner book, so yes, that matters, too for lots of readers.

Going by the 1 page = 250 words rule, my book should have been about 320 pages, around the same length as my Word file. Instead, the designed final book was 368 pages. The type does look largish to my eyes, but it’s not large print.

In my experience, writers talk in terms of word count because writers think in terms of mss. Readers think in terms of pages because they mostly still read printed books and have no reason to look up the word count. But wc is the better measure.

As a browser (apart from story and being involved from the first page) I'm far more interested in readability/font size than page count.

Pencrafter said:

I’m encouraged people expect a bit higher page people expect a bit higher page count when “world-building” is involved.

Reader must be shown and learn this new world with its constructs and even with masterful word economy, this takes space.

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I'm not sure I agree with you, Pencrafter. All novels contain word-building.

Pencrafter said:

In the strictest sense, yes. Provided said “world” is somewhat familiar to the reader, but if the world is not familiar, it requires more words to make it so to the reader encountering it for the first time in the pages of your story.

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This isn't a worldbuilding thread, but how does a writer know what kind of world is familiar to the reader?

To be less disingenuous: I assume you're referring to spec fic, and that's an interesting example to choose because it's the genre most frequently guilty of unnecessary infodumping. You may need some extra words, sure, but probably not 10,000 of them. Probably not enough to bloat your page count.

Pencrafter said:

Others besides me have indicated that this is a known thing that happens with certain types of fiction such that “world-building” requires more words than stories that don’t require “world-building.”

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I'm not sure who you're referring to? While agents and publishers look (on average) for slightly different ranges of word counts depending on genre, I haven't seen anyone on this thread suggest 90-120 for spec fic is due to worldbuilding.

In general, adult fiction of just about any genre is going to range from 80-120K. That includes fantasy. Is that a malleable guideline? Of course. My own books are each about 130K, but that's not because of world-building.

Pencrafter said:

As writers we can imagine stories in which readers need more information to get them to understand the “world” in which the story takes place, in contrast to a story which requires no additional explanation because most readers will already kinda know about that world. Eg: their own city or state, earth, any well-known city on earth,etc.

As opposed to some far-off, made-up world which isn’t like the world we all know.

Do you see it?

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I understood exactly what you meant, and my point stands. Do you know where your readers live? Do you know what they're used to? I've lived in Massachusetts my whole life; there are things about the culture in other parts of the country - never mind the world - that are as alien to me as the atmosphere on Venus. Old Hack is right: all stories need worldbuilding.

Yeah, in spec fic you have to explain (or at least mention, which most of the time is enough) things that are not-Earth. But I still contend that 99.9% of the time if you're doing it in a way that adds multiple thousands of words to your manuscript, you're probably not trusting your readership enough. They may need to know it's been 5 million years since the great nebula burst. They don't need a history lesson about it. Keep that stuff for your own notes.

I did suggest that world building could be a factor in the length of SFF and historicals as opposed to, say, thrillers. That doesn’t mean bloat is excused by world building, of course.

But mainly I want to argue against the thesis that short books are inherently simpler or don’t promote reader engagement. A lot of literary novels are short and brilliant (there are brilliant long ones, too, of course). Great thriller writers like Patricia Highsmith knew how to make the most of a lean word count. A good novel of 60-80k doesn’t feel “micro” to me at all. I’ve written mss. of that length that took a ton more work than other, much longer mss. I wrote did, because writing short is hard. You have to know precisely what’s essential and what you can cut.