The Sword and Laser discussion

It seems like publishers actually want there to be a more or less fixed price for a book. It is what the whole fight with Amazon over agency pricing was about.

I think that if you actually looked at the costs of publishing a book, I don't think a long book is that much more expensive to publish than a short book. The author gets paid a percentage of the sales price, so book length doesn't matter there. I might cost more to edit and bind a longer book, but from what I've heard, I think those costs are a small part of the total cost. Then you would have the advertising budget that is going to be more dependent on how many copies the publisher hopes to sell.

I've sometimes found non-fiction books were really huge and upon downloading find out hat almost 200 pages of it are notes and references. Presidential biographies are a great example.

Shad wrote: "It seems like publishers actually want there to be a more or less fixed price for a book. It is what the whole fight with Amazon over agency pricing was about. ..."

That was more about who gets to set prices, actually. But of course publishers want a predictable price... it's less confusing to the market and far less complex for them and for retailers. Right now mass market paperback format fiction is about $7.99-9.99. As a reader, I know that going in. No one has to explain that this book is $4.99 because it's under 300 pages but that one is 324 pages so it's in a different price category and is $6.99 while the new Peter Hamilton or Neal Stephenson is 896 pages and thus is $12.99.*

Does this mean you pay more per 1000 words for some books vs others? Yeah. But so what? It averages out over a year or so and anyway, the entire idea of paying per word is quite an odd way of looking at novels.

*Yes, I know. Everyone wants the $9.99 to be the top end and shorter books to be cheaper. And I want a pony. But in reality, publishers would center the pricing around there for average length books and make longer ones more expensive to offset the pricing hit they'd be taking on relatively short works. You don't expect them to come up with a pricing table that means they make LESS, do you?

PS: Note, too, the rather small differences in actual prices from what we pay today. This entire discussion is about a rather trivial amount of actual money.

Taking it to the physical realm, I checked 'a darker shade of magic' out at the library, and at that time I thought how cheated I would've felt if I'd paid for it, because the chapters were so short that I guessed like 80 of the four hundred pages were blank space between chapters. When I'm considering a book purchase, I can only guess on how I will perceive the quality, but quantity vs price is a more concrete tool that may nudge me one direction or another when I'm trying to choose my next read.

Yeah, I do think this matters at times. I know it's different because there aren't page counts but with audiobooks I will frequently choose a long book over a short one because I only have the 1 or 2 credits a month and they're really expensive if you buy them outright. I can see how for someone on a budget (like I would be if I hadn't already bought a bunch of books when I had more money) choosing between a long and short book in print would weigh in on the decision to buy.

All of the Discworlds were 350-400 pages or so. I enjoyed the Peter Hamilton tomes just fine, but even the least Discworld beat his best.

I was actually happy that A Darker Shade of Magic was short...

@John I haven't read any Discworld but Hamilton is my favorite sci-fi author. His books are amongst my favorites. I love that they were weighty door stoppers, I wish they were even longer they were so good.

^To each their own! I was ready for them to be done a few hundred pages in advance of the ending, but I did notice the long term development of characters had a real payoff.

Meanwhile, I was really hoping Imprudence would go longer...well, plenty of interest in the sequel, then!

So Discworld is quite good then? I always thought that it didn't really seem like my thing. I may have to give them a try at some point. So much to read already though!

Discworld books are quite short, they are definitely not your thing. You'd only get a few hours entertainment out of them!

Where in this thread did I say I didn't like short books? All I've said is that publishers dishonestly inflate their page counts. Will I sometimes choose a longer book to get more bang for my buck? Sure. But I've read just as many short books I've enjoyed. I think you need to read more books to improve your reading comprehension.

^I thought they were great. I read all 40 over the span of a year or two. There were perhaps a handful that I thought weren't great, and those were the first two (when Terry Pratchett was still finding his voice) and some of the later ones, when his health issues were starting to show. Maybe try Wyrd Sisters and see if a take on Macbeth hits ya the right way. For my money Going Postal is the best, but it's fairly far along the overall Discworld arc.

Gah, I've been wanting to do a Discworld thread...I may start one tonight.

Will I be missing anything by skipping the first 2?

Yes and no. Each book is written to stand on it's own, but reading earlier books, you'll catch long running jokes, and nods to other books. It's best to think of Discworld as a universe that several series and stand alone books take place in, rather than a series in and of itself.

Among the first Discworld books I read were Wyrd Sisters, Mort, and Going Postal. I would recommend those three to get a good taste of Discworld. If you like it, then start at the beginning. Some people love the first two books. I'm not among them, but I didn't hate them. Rather, they are simply decent, and not representative of the high quality of writing to come.

For what it's worth, the first two Discworld books are extremely short and have some good bits, even if it doesn't flow well as a story. And I'm disappointed that Hrun the Barbarian didn't become a recurring character. I'm on a break now after plowing through about the first 15 over the course of about a year.

I'm actually having the opposite problem with the copy of this month's pick I got through interlibrary loan. It is the size of a trade paperback, but the text inside looks more like the text from a mass market paperback. It is pretty small and single spaced. I'm finding that scanning back across the page is taking more effort because the font is so small and there is so little space between lines.

I'm also reading a mass market paperback of A Wrinkle in Time to my son right now that has similar text size and spacing. With the smaller pages, scanning back to the next line is not a problem.