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

The way David Hartwell explained it to me ...

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I'm an alien visitor to the US market. Here's how my editor explained it to me:

Until the early 1990s, mass market SF/F paperbacks were primarily sold via grocery store racks, supplied by local distributors (400+ of them).

During the inflationary 1970s and early 1980s, the publishers wanted to increase their cover prices. But the grocery wholesalers who sold the books insisted "the product's gotta weigh more if you want to charge more". So just as buffalo tomatoes got bigger, so did paperbacks. But you can only get so much milage by using thicker paper and a bigger typeface.

In the 1960s, an SF novel was 60-80,000 words, with 80K being considered overblown and long. By 1990 they'd grown to 90-100,000 words.

Then in 1992 or thereabouts Walmart woke up and said "why the heck are we using eighty bazillion distributors?" and fired 90% of them. They went from 40 in California to just 2. The mass market book racks imploded as a sales channel. But that left Barnes and Noble and Borders a market vacuum to fill. So all was well for a while, with the midlist paperback market replaced by a midlist hardcover market.

Same pressure applies: publishers want to get more money per book, so they try to make the hardbacks bigger. Finally, circa 2001, Borders yanked the brake handle and said "we won't buy any non-bestselling titles that cost over $24 in hardcover or $7 in mass market -- they don't shift" (each $1 over $24 cut sales turnover by 20%, IIRC).

Anyway.

We in SF/F have been trained to expect longer books by the grocery distributors.

I would hypothesize that mysteries did not succumb to this selection pressure because there's a countervailing force at work -- the reader's ability to keep track of multiple characters and plot threads. This is aggravated by the gritty, terse style that has been de rigeur in mystery since the day of Raymond Chandler or Damon Runyon -- yes, there are exceptions, but florid verbosity is generally frowned upon, so you don't get the purple passages so typical of a certain type of fantasy.

Re: The way David Hartwell explained it to me ...

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's what he explained to me, too. Maybe slightly different details, but the pressures--both for lengthening and for capping the length--are dictated by the booksellers rather than the publishers.

The next question is, why did these publishing demands work out so differently in f/sf than in mystery? Why are mystery novels thinner than f/sf? It's not just that f/sf has *room* for doorstop novels and trilogies; I think the average f/sf book is substantially thicker than the average mystery novel.

I will also note that there are more non-series f&sf novels published than non-series mystery--pretty much every genre mystery novel is assumed to be part of a series. Contrawise, as James pointed out, mysteries are at least always complete stories rather than "whoops, reached the word count, go buy the next two novels to see how it turns out".

(I note that romance novels--outside of the disposable novels like Harlequin--have also gotten physically bigger during the period of the growth of f/sf novels.)

Re: The way David Hartwell explained it to me ...

[connactic.livejournal.com]

s/Damon Runyon/Dashiell Hammet/? (Runyon wrote mostly short-from, but I can't see calling it either 'terse' or 'gritty')