I know I've asked this before

[james_davis_nicoll]

I was reading a mystery last night that turned out to be a lot shorter than I expected because the manuscript pages were single-sided. The book turned out to be less than 280 pages long. Despite this lack of length the author managed to fit an entire plot between the two covers.

It's comparatively rare for an SF novel to be that short and nearly unheard of for a fantasy novel to be under 300 pages. I've also never seen a mystery that came close to the brick-like dimensions of many F&SF novels. There seems to be a hard limit of about 400 pages over in mystery.

Mysteries also eschew the cliff-hanger ending and the book-fragment approach, which I greatly appreciate.

Does it make sense to ask why modern [1] F&SF readers appear to prefer longer lengths than do mystery readers?

1: I have a number of older books upstairs that come in under 200 pages and like the mystery they all have complete plots.

Comments

[cheshyre]

Frankly, I'd prefer mystery-length books than giant doorstops which can't finish a complete story.

Perhaps the more important question is why modern F&SF publishers prefer longer works?

[That said, SF&F usually requires a certain amount of worldbuilding that mysteries are not subject to.]

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Is there a reason publishers would be motivated by something other than "we think this is what the readers want?"

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

"Profits will be higher even if sales are lower due to the way production and distribution costs scale"?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Why would this affect F&SF more than other genres, though?

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

One positions one's self in a market that has seven percent of the marketplace differently than one positions one's self in markets that have more than twenty percent (crime) or nearly fifty percent (romance) of the marketplace.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

"We need to fit at least three copies per rack pocket."

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I have this dim memory from the 1980s that there's a magic book length that determines the boundary between when you can fit as many or more books faced as spine out but I think that puts a cap on length rather than encouraging longer books.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Faced vs. spine is a shelf thing; in rack pockets everything is faced. But there's a fairly standard size, and it turns out you don't want to get most of your authors above the length where fewer than "n" books fit in a pocket (I think n=3, but I'm less certain on the number than on the basic concept).

I'm still remembering sf/fantasy authors being *cut back* on acceptable lengths a while ago, after the initial growth through the 80s.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

Buyers, not readers. Publishers don't give a fresh dog turd about whether the book actually gets read, just purchased.

How many Harry Potter fans got multiple copies of "Beadle the Bard" this holiday season from friends and family who think they would like it. (I saw someone yesterday in a Borders and Nobel returning four copies of B the B.

[fredcritter.livejournal.com]

Same reason publishers know it's death to put green on the cover…

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Here's my cynical view.

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.