So, the idea of cuts is a scary one. I can think of my own novel I'm working on, how it divides, and I shudder to think of where publishers you're speaking of would cut it, and it scares me to think that I'd be overlooked on the shelf just because my book was thinner than others. And then I think about how some writers are such fast reads, and that longer books for such writers feels like a shorter book for writers who are dense and more difficult to wade through. The cuts are not a great idea.
This isn't the first time this has happened--back in the late 80s, when the price of paper skyrocketed, I was actually sent the galleys, and got a phone call the SAME DAY telling me not to touch them, another set was coming. And it had smaller print, it had chapters starting on the backs of pages--in short, FIRES OF NUALA (publisher's title...uggh) is the same length, 120,000 words or so, as FIRE SANCTUARY--but it looks like it's a 70,000 word novel. Same with HIDDEN FIRES--
And a friend who was stocking D/FW airport at the time ran rows of FIRE SANCTUARY down the sides of the displays, because I was the only large SF novel that came out that month--but he could not do that with the other two books, because they would be perceived as not long enough for a plane trip.
Also--I remember Charles de Lint complaining because of the "Waldenbooks Rule" that required books be a certain spine size so a certain number would fit in a row in a Waldenbooks. Does anyone remember the size? Something odd like 11/32?
We've been here before. I am VERY glad you brought this up, because I have been trying to figure out how to expand an idea to fit the larger formatting, as opposed to writing multiple 150,000 word books interconnected in a world.
When the day comes that we go totally electronic, I imagine larger books will return to the fore.
But still another problem remains--twice as many books are being published as twenty years ago. Less books are being reviewed. How to find what you want?
There was a great free review newspaper BookStop carried, before B&N bought them. I'd literally go through it, read all the reviews on ALL mysteries coming out that month, and decide what I wanted. What a great selling device! Long gone, of course...
How will readers find us? We can write, or we can promote--but it's not easy to do both well....
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branchandroot
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Date: 2004-09-10 08:41 am (UTC)This isn't the first time this has happened--back in the late 80s, when the price of paper skyrocketed, I was actually sent the galleys, and got a phone call the SAME DAY telling me not to touch them, another set was coming. And it had smaller print, it had chapters starting on the backs of pages--in short, FIRES OF NUALA (publisher's title...uggh) is the same length, 120,000 words or so, as FIRE SANCTUARY--but it looks like it's a 70,000 word novel. Same with HIDDEN FIRES--
And a friend who was stocking D/FW airport at the time ran rows of FIRE SANCTUARY down the sides of the displays, because I was the only large SF novel that came out that month--but he could not do that with the other two books, because they would be perceived as not long enough for a plane trip.
Also--I remember Charles de Lint complaining because of the "Waldenbooks Rule" that required books be a certain spine size so a certain number would fit in a row in a Waldenbooks. Does anyone remember the size? Something odd like 11/32?
We've been here before. I am VERY glad you brought this up, because I have been trying to figure out how to expand an idea to fit the larger formatting, as opposed to writing multiple 150,000 word books interconnected in a world.
When the day comes that we go totally electronic, I imagine larger books will return to the fore.
But still another problem remains--twice as many books are being published as twenty years ago. Less books are being reviewed. How to find what you want?
There was a great free review newspaper BookStop carried, before B&N bought them. I'd literally go through it, read all the reviews on ALL mysteries coming out that month, and decide what I wanted. What a great selling device! Long gone, of course...
How will readers find us? We can write, or we can promote--but it's not easy to do both well....