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Lord of the Reams: How a Paper Shortage Created Modern Fantasy

On the exact opposite end in terms of both quality and influence, Tom Kratman's A Desert Called Peace started as one book but was split into two simply because his tendency to er, "sprawl", meant it was too big to print as a mass market paperback.
 
the tiresome and entirely accidental trope of the ‘obligatory fantasy trilogy’ which so many writers now see as their default book format, regardless of how much or how little story they have to fill it

Tell us how you really feel!
 
Sorry, you've lost me there.

It's Kratman, so the less you really know the better. He's probably the biggest concern I have possibly publishing with Baen, but most of the other SciFi/Fantasy outlets are much more opaque and need agents I'm still negotiating with.
 
I'll have to ask @Kato if 100K is over-long for a vignette for the monthly challenge.

Depends upon whether your native tongue is Old Entish.

(This doesn't really work on reflection, because the reason it takes a long time to say anything in Entish is down to very slow speech patterns, not high word counts).

The perceived tendency for fantasy to go for doorstopper volumes, and trilogy+ series is an interesting one. I remember back in school before the Jackson film series, "The Lord of the Rings" was seen as one of those intimidatingly thick books that nobody actually read cover to cover - much like "War and Peace" has remained in popular imagination. Then I remember the bloating of the Harry Potter books from 4 onwards, and it definitely seemed to become more of a thing to expect thick volumes, especially in fantasy or young adult/fantasy crossover series' with the mid noughties boom in that genre.

I'll confess I've always felt a slight envy for the authors who settle on a long running series of title after title following the same arc or character. The point about nominally stand alone new works containing sequel- and trilogy-hooks is well observed. I wonder how much of that is down to cynical marketing, and how much is down to authors having the very human tendency to want to always know what happens next for their characters?
 
Paper shortages as rejection excuse by publishers long into the 1970s - Iain Banks' first novel, (the still-unpublished and approx 400,000 words) "The Tashkent Rambler" was rejected due to an alleged paper shortage in the circa 1974.

Charlie Stross has an interesting take on the length of books as part of his 'Common Misconceptions About Publishing' series on his blog.
 
Paper shortages as rejection excuse by publishers long into the 1970s - Iain Banks' first novel, (the still-unpublished and approx 400,000 words) "The Tashkent Rambler" was rejected due to an alleged paper shortage in the circa 1974.

Charlie Stross has an interesting take on the length of books as part of his 'Common Misconceptions About Publishing' series on his blog.
I remember the reason the Belgariad is five books is because three would have been too big for the page limit at the time (the wordcount was I believe pretty much the same in this case).
 
Also, I do wonder if the trilogy is a fairly natural way to plan what is intended as a multi-volume saga - a duology feels a bit restrictive if you're going to have sequels at all, and you're generally going to plan too many (Harry Potter being the obvious exception on that score). Aren't three acts pretty common for a play, as well?
Then again, ISTR tetralogies were more common in Ancient Greece, and that probably fits into the same sort of range (five probably being the upper end), so trilogies are still probably not foreordained.
 
I remember the reason the Belgariad is five books is because three would have been too big for the page limit at the time (the wordcount was I believe pretty much the same in this case).

Yeah, over 424 pages and publishers have to have to shrink the typeface (no easy job in the olden days), or subcontract the stitching on the hardback, or publish it solely as softback, which means it won't get reviewed.

(One of the few retail jobs I wasn't sacked from was a bookshop. Does it show?)
 
I suspect that the virtual nature of media is going to blast all notions of how long a book/epic/trilogy/series should be completely out of the water. When a gigabyte of hard drive space translates to about 180 million words (assuming 8 bits per character, six characters per word on average, 1 GB = 178.9 million), and tablets and some e-readers and tablets are now in the 32 and even 64 GB range, we’ll soon reach the point where an author can have a ten million word book published in e-book format.

Really the only constraint in the length of a book at this point is how long the author will live to work on it!
 
we’ll soon reach the point where an author can have a ten million word book published in e-book format.

That exists as a project and is terrifying on every level imaginable. If you value your sanity, just go in, read the header with the word count, and leave. Don't stop moving, don't start reading, and whatever you do don't blame me for knowing this exists.

https://m.fanfiction.net/s/10333897/1/Ambience-A-Fleet-Symphony

Four point five million words, the longest single piece of fiction in the English Language. All of it terrible, and exactly the sort of garbage the can ruin a man.
 
This is a Bad Thing. I'm talking about in relation to the quality of the story.

The precise perfect length of a story will depend on the individual situation, but when authors have a word count to worry about, they check to make sure that the words they do use have a purpose and add to the story. Without that limitation, there are authors who will just ramble on digressions, lose track of what the story is, and end up with a meandering, meaningless wodge of prose that is of interest to no-one except (possibly) the author.

I, of all people, should know.
That exists as a project and is terrifying on every level imaginable. If you value your sanity, just go in, read the header with the word count, and leave. Don't stop moving, don't start reading, and whatever you do don't blame me for knowing this exists.

https://m.fanfiction.net/s/10333897/1/Ambience-A-Fleet-Symphony

Four point five million words, the longest single piece of fiction in the English Language. All of it terrible, and exactly the sort of garbage the can ruin a man.

Well, of course it’s going to be awful, but we are all going to live to see it... well, provided no one kills themselves first rather than be in the same world as it.
 
I don't think it's going to be no limits as such, though they will be fuzzier. I've noticed most fanfiction writers try both to keep to some kind of schedule in what's essentially a serial format and to keep their chapters in a vaguely similar sort of range (though that does often mean splitting chapters off rather than tightening up, I suppose). And I think in terms of readability, at least on sites like AO3 and ff.net there is a particular ideal range for segments in those serials, I think dictated by how easy it is to read in one sitting squeezed in between doing other things. As a reader, I'd describe it as something along the lines of when I load the page on my desktop, the line at the bottom of my screen should be between a quarter and a half of the way through the chapter Any shorter and not enough's happening, any longer and, unless it's very good, I'll at best start hurrying to the point I'm no longer really reading but skimming, and often - especially if it keeps happening - give up on the story.
I think the format we tend to see here on AH.com is probably similar in this, but because of the different website format, it's less visually obvious to me the point at which I start reacting that way.
 
Paper shortages as rejection excuse by publishers long into the 1970s - Iain Banks' first novel, (the still-unpublished and approx 400,000 words) "The Tashkent Rambler" was rejected due to an alleged paper shortage in the circa 1974.

Charlie Stross has an interesting take on the length of books as part of his 'Common Misconceptions About Publishing' series on his blog.
Having now read this, I found it very interesting but two things jumped out at me:
1. He mentions newsstand magazines collapsing in the early 50s, but not really why. Can anyone say more, or point me to something about that specifically?
2. He says that British publishers use a style of binding that allows bigger hardbacks, compared to American ones, which surprised me, as my impression was it was American books that were most likely to be divided for publication elsewhere (though less for UK publication than French or German).
 
And I read the first two paragraphs.
...
And I thought I used adverbs too much.

There's a reason I describe it in the sort of apocalyptic language best seen at nuclear power plants failures and dam breakages.

I think the format we tend to see here on AH.com is probably similar in this, but because of the different website format, it's less visually obvious to me the point at which I start reacting that way.

My experience working with all of the above suggests a serial works best if your weekly update is between 2k and 5k words; and you post it to doesn't really affect that. Forum or archive, you need to be swift enough to get something across, but large enough to have connection to a greater continuity.
 
1. He mentions newsstand magazines collapsing in the early 50s, but not really why. Can anyone say more, or point me to something about that specifically?

A magazine like Picture Post was shifting 1.9 million copies a week in 1949, but by 1957 it had closed.

2. He says that British publishers use a style of binding that allows bigger hardbacks, compared to American ones, which surprised me, as my impression was it was American books that were most likely to be divided for publication elsewhere

IIRC Peter F Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy was cut up into six volumes for US consumption.
 
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