3

By Chris Meadows

image91[1] Charlie Stross has posted the latest article in his series on “Common Misconceptions About Publishing”. This one has to do with why novels are the length they are.

There are some interesting stories here, such as the suggestion that the reason paperbacks have gotten thicker and thicker over the years because of the preconceptions of grocery distributors (i.e. if it costs more, it should be thicker).

Stross also explains why he had to split his Merchant Princes books into several more volumes than originally intended—hardcover novels in the USA are capped at 424 pages for technical reasons, and ones that go longer than that have to be handled by special, more expensive binderies so they save them for very special cases.

At the end, Stross notes:

Going forward, I speculate that if we make a successful transition to ebooks — that is: if ebooks become a major sales channel and authors are still writing professional quality work for money, and readers are finding some way to pay them — we may see a revival of other formats: novellas for one (they’re undergoing a renaissance in SF publishing among the smaller publishers), the Dickensian serial for another, and the gigantic shoebox-sized monster for a third. The corsetting of the modern novel to fit between the tight constraints of binding costs and price elasticity of demand will be unstrung, or replaced by bras, or some other over-stressed metaphorical construct.

This puts me in mind of some of the writing forums I covered in my “Paleo E-books” columns. There have been a number of different experimental writing formats in Internet fiction, including some of the ones about which Stross speculates.

The transition to e-books might indeed open up some very interesting territory for new narrative forms. We’ll just have to wait and see. As it is right now, e-books are limited by the limitations of the old printed form, and that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

 
3