beta wisdom

How to find Beta Readers: Is your book too long?

Asking a stranger (or even really good friend) to read your 220,000 word historical fiction is a huge commitment. Don’t blame yourself if they say no, and don’t blame yourself if you have written a book that is simply too long to catch anyones interest.

We have been trained to think longer is better. This, combined with the fact that many (especially new) authors have difficulty cutting things they have written, contributes to bloat.

I am not going to touch on editing your own writing or how you know when to cut things that are not working, or even things that are working. I do however want to talk about 3 big, often invisible influences on novel length that unfairly cloud our perceptions of what a “good book” should look like.

Good stories do not require more words and better authors do not necessarily write longer books.

Before I go any further I want to say that I am in no way trying to imply that long books are bad books. I merely aim to counter the idea that long books are better and to advocate that short books are in no way inferior.

You have been trained to think longer is better because of money $$$$$$.

What are the 3 Invisible forces that make us think longer is better?

The classics of the past are long. The Brothers Karamazov, The Count of Monte Cristo, all of Dickens, those bad boys are thick!

All authors want to be remembered, so we look at what books have withstood the test of time. However, those books and many many others were serialized in magazines over many months or even years, and then collected and reprinted. This means that those authors were working to fill a monthly word count for their magazine editors. They were not working to complete a novel, they were earning their steady income by bringing people back month after month, satisfying their interest but leaving them wanting just enough come back again next month. Taking into account the pressures of the delivery system, those books have more in common with comic book authors and the eventual graphic novel collections than what authors are doing today. Certainly those authors are great, but the length of those books is the result of money concerns, not craft.

Thicker books are easier to sell in bookstores. This is a qualified statement so I am going to try and make sure I am as clear as possible. Every book you could possibly want is available online and most digitally. Bookstores are still important. I love them and I am guessing most of you do as well. The reason we love them is because of the element of discovery. A bookstore is the place we spot something we didn’t know we wanted, hopefully a new favorite. On a bookstore shelf most books spend most of their life spine out. Thicker spine = more room to advertise, catch the eye, and make a sale. As the number of bookshelves available to publishers has shrunk, every advantage has gone up in value. Publishers will use all kinds of strategies – fluffier paper, creative binding, odd sizes, unique inks – to make their spines stand out. Books that get noticed get sold. A good example of how much printing choices can influence a book’s profile can been seen on  the Bible shelf in the bookstore. Content is mostly the same, but width varies wildly.

You can charge more for a larger book. It makes better economic sense to promote and sell copies of an $11.99 book that has 696 pages than a book that is $6.99 and has 260 pages. This also applies to size formats. Often times when a book sees a surge in popularity, a publisher will release new editions with a large trim size, more pages and a higher price tag. If you want an example of this go to a bookstore and find the Game of Thrones shelf. There has been a huge proliferation of different size formats and version to choose from and the larger they are the more you pay, even though the content, the story, is unchanged

An Experiment you can do: Go into your local bookstore, find the Game of Thrones section(because there will be a section). Grab one of the large format paperbacks and check how many pages, between 1000 and 1200, and how much they are charging for it, probably around $9.99. Now find a book you have never heard of on the shelf close by that is the same size and width. Now check the page counts and prices. I did this last week and the first book I checked was just over 700 pages and the same price, 400 fewer pages, 25% less book with the same profit potential.

Consumers associate the price with the physical object they are buying so publishers shrewdly work to use that to make a profit both for themselves and their authors and they are good at it. You saw the same thing happen when the Harry Potter hardbacks came out. It normalized buying hardback books, making it much easier to sell hardback YA books. It remains the norm to this day.  

The great irony about all of the above is that it makes no difference to anyone selling digital copies.

The internet sells every book cover out. So write a shorter book, for goodness sake! The Great Gatsby, the great American novel, is usually printed on fewer than 200 pages and wouldn’t even qualify for NaNoWriMo since it is less than 50k words.

Why go into any of the above? Well if no one is finishing your book when you ask them to beta your book, maybe think about taking another look at its length and asking yourself if the reason it is long is because the story needs it or you think the length makes it better.




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