Novel Lengths Revisited

A more commercially-focused dataset. Essay. 800 words, 4-minute read.

Image: https://en.meming.world/wiki/File:Two_Books.jpg/

A few months ago I posted an essay which looked at the word counts/page lengths of novels over the past century, or so. (https://raytabler.substack.com/p/novel-lengths-over-the-years) 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.

END.

Reference links:

http://www.kruegerbooks.com/books/best-sellers/index.html

https://capitalizemytitle.com/famous-book-series-and-novel-word-counts

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