Novel lengths Revisted
By Ray Tabler
A few months ago I posted an essay which looked at the word counts/page lengths of novels over the past s century, or so. This was an effort to verify (or disprove) the anecdote that novels used to be a lot shorter than these days. I struggle to wrote long books, and hoped for some justification. The story turned out to be more complicated, as illustrated by a graph from that essay, shown below.
Novels used to be shorter. They also used to be longer before that. I can’t predict the future, but it looks like novel lengths are headed shorter again in a cyclic downturn. All well and good, except that the data I used was from a (possibly arbitrary) “most-read” novels list over the past couple of centuries. Perhaps these novels are something like what an English teacher assigns, as opposed to what an aspiring novelist should shoot for (in order to make a living).
So, I went in search of a larger and, ideally, more commercially-focused data set. Publisher’s Weekly has been tracking books sales for over a century, and that information is readily available. The good people at kruegerbooks dot com have posted the list, top 10 best-sellers by each year. In fact, that’s way more data than I wanted to deal with, since I had to look up and type the page lengths on Amazon and Gutenberg, then type them in manually. I’m not lazy, but I’m not that diligent either. As a compromise, I only sampled the list every 5 years (1900, 1905, 1910, …, 2005). Then, I converted those quinquennial snapshots to word counts at 280 words per page. Yes, I realize that word count per page likely varies over the last 100 years. That was ignored. Here is the resulting graph.
This, more commercially-focused data generally mirrors the previous information, from 1900 forward. There’s no shortage of big honking tomes on the best-sellers list. But it’s a bit surprising that there aren’t more. The bulk of the wordcounts hug the 100,000 line for most of the period examined. After 1940, there are more really long books. Perhaps that reflects post-war prosperity and increased leisure time to read heavy books.
A plot of both sets of data on the same graph shows overall similarity, with some interesting differences. I suppose this reflects the gap between what the book buying public will pay to read versus what English teachers think you ought to read.
Will writing a longer book translate to more sales? The plot below displays the data, indicating sales rank, within the top 10 best-sellers for that year. Massive, door-stops of books are not always the top seller. Often, the longest popular book for a year isn’t even in the top 3. The book-buying public is a fickle bunch. No surprise there.
I recognized many of the titles while masticating the data. Out of curiosity, I sorted by word count to find the 10 shortest and 10 longest books represented. Those are shown in the tables below. The shortest is Goodbye Mr. Chips, 12,500 words (50 pages), which technically only qualifies as a novelette. The longest is James Michener’s Texas, 368,000 words (close to 1500 pages). Everything is bigger in Texas.
Shortest Books in the dataset
Longest Books in the dataset
The novels covered here are all top 10 best-sellers. Which is nice work if you can get it. Genre is ignored. Practically speaking, most authors are compelled to focus on one or two genres, and word counts might loom larger in those neighborhoods. I am told that longer is better in my chosen field, fantasy and science fiction. I don’t doubt that to be the case. I suspect mysteries and romance, other genres might be different. But, I didn’t look at data along those lines. Contact me if, you want the data to crunch on your own.
END.
Reference links:
http://www.kruegerbooks.com/books/best-sellers/index.html
https://capitalizemytitle.com/famous-book-series-and-novel-word-counts/
https://raytabler.substack.com/p/novel-lengths-over-the-years
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So I guess the takeaway for authors is: Just write your book at the length that it should be for the story that you're writing.
Word count in books can be approached in different ways. There’s guidelines by genre for what traditional publishers will publish, especially for first time novelists. Basically, if you ignore these guidelines you won’t get published. If you self publish anything goes. The reality is unless you are a proven author with a sales track record, it’s tough to sell a 1,000 page book. Most people today, even serious readers often don’t want to take on a book that long.
While your analysis is interesting, I don’t see a lot of value from a guidance standpoint. I did data analytics professionally before I retired and you have enough data to make any case you like.
At the end of the day, just write the best story you can at whatever length makes sense and then find your audience and publisher. For every rule there’s someone who successfully breaks it.
Thanks for an interesting dive into the data.