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For the Love of Lucy

@for-the-love-of-lucy / for-the-love-of-lucy.tumblr.com

man i sure like stuff! and things!
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for-the-love-of-lucy
eighthdoctor
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unpretty
seersucker-for-love asked:

This isn't entirely on topic regarding the 100,000 word debate that person is so clearly in the wrong about, but I will say that my publisher actually insists on a minimum length of 100k words because that's the length where KU starts to make decent money and it's worth it to record an audiobook because it will be a decent duration. Market forces are actively working against shorter works, which is a shame, but it's silly to think no book should be 100k words or longer.

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unpretty answered:

when i posted that short list of 100k+ word novels i genuinely assumed there had been a misunderstanding. like i was gently ribbing them for reading a lot of fanfic and getting a warped idea of how big a 100k novel was. around 300 pages? you go to the grocery store and look at all the romances and thrillers at the checkout and shake your head about books getting too long?

because like. if they didn't realize they were actually thinking of 300k novels there could be an interesting conversation about the market moving toward longer books for the reasons you describe. or the rise of comically long webnovels that need to be split into seven volumes in print. or novellas like the murderbot series or the singing hills cycle being devalued because they're short and no one wants to pay Five Whole Dollars for an excellent piece of writing that's just 30k.

instead i ended up blocking them when i realized they were dead serious about thinking terry pratchett's monstrous regiment should have been split into a trilogy.

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unpretty

i think it hit me extra funny because as a Romance Enjoyer i am used to getting the exact opposite attitude. oh, you read a lot of books? well those books don't count because they're little idiot books for babies. that paperback will fit in your purse. you call that a book? call me when you've finished reading the tenth volume of the Blood Of Grim And Grit series, which is a detailed history of england beginning in caveman times except the author added a wizard who doesn't actually seem to do very much.

meanwhile this dude is out here like. "why are there all these quiet character moments in a romance novel. why does this sci-fi novel have so much worldbuilding. this is detracting from the plot. this book should only be half as long and should be entirely focused on resolving the property dispute that resulted in this contract marriage." my guy is out here looking at ninety minute pornos and complaining that they could have brought it down to twenty minutes if they all kept their pants on and focused on figuring out what happened to their pizza. what a new and refreshing hill to see someone die on. i'm delighted by the novelty of it.

#this is wild discourse and i love it tbh#queue queue more
for-the-love-of-lucy
eighthdoctor
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unpretty

someone put this screenshot in my notes and i wasn't gonna put the op on blast but i cannot stop thinking about it. this is up there as one of the funniest doubling downs i've ever seen. "it's called craft. it's called storytelling." is going to enter my meme vernacular and no one is going to have any idea what i'm talking about. the count of monte cristo shows a clear lack of craft in its wordcount. if only ernest hemingway's editor had killed more of his darlings while he wrote for whom the bell tolls. readers and editors alike are always complaining about how fucking long to kill a mockingbird is.

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for-the-love-of-lucy
packitandgo
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hawkeyedflame

it's amazing how ordinary objects can become so significant to only the owner

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hawkeyedflame

when my aunt's best friend passed away, my younger brother was four years old. at his funeral, my brother went up to her and gave her a nickel. he told her very solemnly that it would make her feel better. she smiled for the first time in days, and tucked it in her wallet.

when my brother was 22, his best friend passed away unexpectedly. my aunt drove three hours to be there for him at the funeral. she went up to my brother, gave him a big hug, and then gave him a nickel. it was the same nickel; she had kept it in her wallet for 18 years, and now it's on a necklace that he never takes off.

what i'm trying to say is that the love you put into the world will always find its way back to you.

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for-the-love-of-lucy
eighthdoctor
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unpretty

i will never complain about a book seeming like a fanfic with the serial numbers filed off because that means the author had the invaluable ability to tell when their au had diverged enough that these were just straight-up different characters now

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unpretty

even as we speak there is probably someone out there writing a delightful 100k+ word gay romance novel about a genderqueer bisexual single parent who lives in a beach town and fixes classic cars and falls in love with the sexy tentacle monster mermaid that saved their life, and that writer could probably make pretty good money self-publishing it, but they won't because that would mean admitting that they aren't really writing destiel anymore

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unpretty

love that despite not being in the fandom i hit the middle of the venn diagram of 'characters that the average person would never in a million years recognize as dean winchester' and 'characters that a certain subset of fans would immediately think are dean winchester' so perfectly that i've since been told i described multiple popular fics

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writing5novelsatonce

my only disagreement is that nothing over 100,000 words can be "delightful"

file the serial numbers off and get an editor

(or at the VERY least, have the self-respect to hack it into three books and call it a 'triology' if you /want/ to tap into the market of people who want doorstoppers.)

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unpretty

just checking stats in calibre using its wordcounter, it tells me:

  • gideon the ninth is 141k
  • the welcome to night vale novel is 101k
  • the long way to a small angry planet is 132k
  • the duchess war is 100k
  • good omens is 113k
  • dread nation is 105k
  • network effect is 117k
  • one good earl deserves a lover is 108k
  • priory of the orange tree (which i do consider a doorstopper! you could murder mr boddy in the library with this hardcover!) is 266k

have you considered that if you think the average paperback romance novel is a doorstopper, you might prefer novellas

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thebibliosphere

I was reading that comment and thinking to myself, three books out of 100k? Maybe three novellas, but not three novels.

Three YA novels, maybe.

For adult fiction, it's about 60-100k per average for a novel, depending on the genre. Anything under about 50k is a novella, iirc.

Which is fine if that's what you like reading. But 100k is not unwieldy. And many of us churning out those word counts do have very exacting editors :)

(Hunger Pangs was 120k-ish, and people still complain to me that it was too short.)

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