Publishers need a certain ratio of words to income as part of a spreadsheet to justify themselves to their investors. However, new authors are a chancy thing- more often then not they won't pan out. So to their eyes it is safer to have one author writing 5X words, than 5 authors writing X words.
Also (and more seriously), advertising a novel, persuading both the book sellers and the public to buy it, is a non-trivial expense. By having fewer, larger novels the publishers and sellers can concentrate their advertising dollars on a few, focused ad campaigns.
The upshot of this trend of course will be a single book published each year, approximately the size of the entire world-book encyclopedia set.
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Publishers need a certain ratio of words to income as part of a spreadsheet to justify themselves to their investors. However, new authors are a chancy thing- more often then not they won't pan out. So to their eyes it is safer to have one author writing 5X words, than 5 authors writing X words.
Also (and more seriously), advertising a novel, persuading both the book sellers and the public to buy it, is a non-trivial expense. By having fewer, larger novels the publishers and sellers can concentrate their advertising dollars on a few, focused ad campaigns.
The upshot of this trend of course will be a single book published each year, approximately the size of the entire world-book encyclopedia set.