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> I'm often sent stories that are way too long or too short for the publishing industry. The average novel is at least 50,000 words. I find it fascinating that

> I'm often sent stories that are way too long or too short for the publishing industry. The average novel is at least 50,000 words. I find it fascinating that there are sweet spots for the length of an economically successful book (50,000 words), movie (90-120 minutes), or song (3 minutes). For whatever reason, even collections of short films packaged together as a feature-length movie are rarely successful. Likewise with short written works packaged as a full-length book. I guess songs were the exception in that multiple songs sold together as an album did work (at least until recent years). It's interesting to think about how attention span, delivery mechanism, costs of goods, and who knows what other factors, created these target lengths.

ghaff 8y ago
philg wrote this about 10 years ago. https://philip.greenspun.com/writing/changed-by-web-and-weblog https://philip.greenspun.com/writing/changed-by-web-and-webl... But, yeah, the economics of publishing (even in digital) still basically require you to pad a book out to about 200 pages or so even if the topic could fit more into 100 and be more focused as a result. You do see shorter books coming out from the likes of O'Reilly but a lot of those are sponsored by companies as giveaways. And, if you self-publish, you can do anything you like. But there still seems to be a general attitude that it's not a "real" book unless it's 200 pages.
Izkata 8y ago
> I guess songs were the exception in that multiple songs sold together as an album did work (at least until recent years). I'm fairly sure this was just an illusion. Liking a full album seems really rare, the general sentiment with anyone I talked to about this was that they bought it just to get 2-3 of the tracks available. Imagine if there was no such thing as a 90-minute movie, and they were all made up of 9, 10-minute movies. They'd appear very successful as well.

ghaff 8y ago

philg wrote this about 10 years ago. https://philip.greenspun.com/writing/changed-by-web-and-weblog https://philip.greenspun.com/writing/changed-by-web-and-webl... But, yeah, the economics of publishing (even in digital) still basically require you to pad a book out to about 200 pages or so even if the topic could fit more into 100 and be more focused as a result. You do see shorter books coming out from the likes of O'Reilly but a lot of those are sponsored by companies as giveaways. And, if you self-publish, you can do anything you like. But there still seems to be a general attitude that it's not a "real" book unless it's 200 pages.

Izkata 8y ago

> I guess songs were the exception in that multiple songs sold together as an album did work (at least until recent years). I'm fairly sure this was just an illusion. Liking a full album seems really rare, the general sentiment with anyone I talked to about this was that they bought it just to get 2-3 of the tracks available. Imagine if there was no such thing as a 90-minute movie, and they were all made up of 9, 10-minute movies. They'd appear very successful as well.