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Why are SF and fantasy novels the length they are?

It's a question that comes up quite often — back in the 1960s a typical SF novel ran to 60,000 words (130-150 pages); one that topped 80,000 words was considered lengthy. But today, I'm more or less required by contract to hand in 100,000 word novels; and some of them are considerably longer. (At 145,000 words, "Accelerando" would have been considered a whopper back in the 1970s.) So what happened?

Here's how one of my editors (who's been in the business for close to 40 years) explained it to me ...

Until the early 1990s, mass market SF/F paperbacks in the US were primarily sold via grocery store racks, supplied by local distributors (400+ of them). The standard wire rack held books face-out, either against a wall or on a rotating stand. And that's where the short form factor novel became established. Thinner books meant you could shove more of them into a rack that was, say, three inches deep. Go over half an inch thick, and you could no longer fit six paperbacks in a 3" rack. And there was only so much rack space to go around.

During the inflationary 1970s and early 1980s, prices of just about everything soared. The publishers needed to increase their cover prices to compensate. But the grocery wholesalers who sold the books insisted "the product's gotta weigh more if you want to charge more". They weren't in the book business, after all, so just as buffalo tomatoes got bigger, so did paperbacks. (Even though this meant there was less room to go round in the wire racks.) You can only get so much milage by using thicker paper and a bigger typeface; so they began looking for longer novels.

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. Luckily the word processing revolution came along in the 1990s, making it easier to write and revise longer books. (A different editor of my acquaintance observed that whenever one of her novelists switched to word processing, the average length of their books increased by about 10% .)

Then in 1992 or thereabouts Walmart Safeway woke up and said "why the heck are we using eighty bazillion distributors?" and fired 90% of them. The number of grocery distributors in California collapsed from 40 to just 2; across the US, 85% of the distributors went bust or merged. 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.

But the same length pressure applies: publishers want to get more money per book, and over two decades they had successfully trained their end customers, the readers, to expect fatter books. So they tried 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're not selling". (Each $1 over $24 apparently reduced sales turnover by 20%: new novels by unknown authors simply didn't sell at $30.)

Anyway. I began selling novels (in 2001-02) just as the trend for longer novels peaked. I'm actually writing shorter books than my earlier ones — my last two finished manuscripts ran to 102,000 and 107,000 words respectively, whereas my first three SF novels ran to 118,000, 138,000 and 145,000 words each. (On the other hand, I'm not necessarily writing less. Two bloated 150,000 word behemoths take nearly as long to write as three relatively slim 100,000 word novels, if you've got your future projects planned out well in advance.)

There's just one outstanding problem with this Just So tale of publishing folk. We who read SF/F may have been trained to expect longer books by the grocery distributors, but why haven't mysteries grown the same way? It turns out that the average mystery is much the same length that it ever was. There are exceptions, but they're obvious as such — you don't regularly see 400 or 500 page mysteries on the shelves.

I would hypothesize that mysteries didn't succumb to the selection pressure for longer books because there's a countervailing force at work — the reader's ability to keep track of multiple characters and plot threads. If you want to bulk up an SF or fantasy novel, the easy (and lazy) way to do it is to add viewpoint characters and plot threads, small stories interleaved within the larger story that shed light on it. But it's hard to do that if what you're trying to hand the reader is a comprehensive set of clues to a fixed scenario, without burying them in a midden of red herrings. Which leaves stylistic efflorecense; but a gritty, relatively terse style that has been de rigeur in mystery since Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett — there are exceptions, but florid verbosity is generally frowned upon.

Am I missing anything?



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