A song of Ice and Fire and Word Count

[ThinkerX]

An overly long word count is probably something I don't have to worry about, barring an omnibus edition.

Quite the opposite: Even my novels tend to fall shy of 70,000 words. Much of this year I have been working on a series of 35,000 word novellas (something on the order of a hundred pages in publishing land, give or take...I think.)

I suppose, that if the counts work out as estimated, the one novella series - 6 in all - would top 200,000 words, maybe 220,000.

I do remember that a lot of the older SF books, including then groundbreakers like Norton's 'Witch World' and LeGuin's 'EarthSea' checked in at well under 200 pages for each individual book.

 

[Miskatonic]

I'm a little opposite Russ when it comes to picking out books. If the page count listing is under 300 pages, I usually won't buy it if I'm unfamiliar with the author. I like reading hefty tomes—on Kindle, nowadays, so metaphorically hefty—and personally am not a great fan of unusually short books.

I haven't had a particularly good experience finding great indie books, anyway. A poorly written 300-page book and a poorly written 600-page book are pretty much the same for me: I'm going to stop reading after the first 60-75 pages probably, either way.

The Kindle phenomenon is interesting in the way that size is somewhat vague if you don't first check out the # pages listed on Amazon for the book.

100k words is around 400 pages. Would you still consider that short, going by the length of novels you like to read?

 

[FifthView]

100k words is around 400 pages. Would you still consider that short, going by the length of novels you like to read?

It's not short for me. I consider anything under 300 pages to be short, although I'll still read those if other indicators are that I should. (Familiar/favorite author, good word of mouth, etc.)

 

[Ban]

My style of writing tends to gravitate towards short chapters and i think my main projects will eventually (somewhere in the next century) become a series of relatively short books. About 80.000 words maximum. Would this be a very big problem? Surely a publisher can just lower the price of the book to suit the length right?