Here are a few stories to read this Friday morning.
- The Guardian has spun The Authors Guild's bogus income report as blaming Amazon. That is not my take..
- This pop-up book explores what urban wildlife might look like in a few thousand years.
- Longer books may not be better, but readers do rate them higher.
- The WSJ looks at Amazon's publishing operation without actually saying much that was new (such as Amazon's publishing revenues, which we still don't know).
The longer books study could have been done better and could have been made more relevant by studying only fiction published in the last 10 years. Also, ebooks probably provide more accurate counts of book size — page numbers can be padded.Actually, come to think of it, ebooks can be padded as well!
That is an important question to me at the moment. I have a 150K project that I’ve (regretfully) decided to split into 2 volumes — and not mainly for commercial reasons. Some authors might make it into 3 volumes (or even more), while in some genres, sprawling novels seem to provide a commercial advantage.
Some authors are managing ok by releasing their books in drips, some as little as 5K words (esp true in genres like erotica). Overall I think indie authors are releasing shorter books more frequently, while authors backed by a big publisher can get away with longer works.
As for my own buying habits, I never buy anything smaller than 25,000 words, and my threshold is usually 50K. I recently bought a 4 book omnibus of William Styron for the jaw-droppingly low price of $2.40.
I think Amazon’s price structure is driving page length somewhat. For indie authors and publishers, the question is, what kind of content can I sell for the price point where you get 70 percent royalties instead of 30 percent (currently it’s 2.99).