Books are getting longer.
I wonder how much of that is down to ebooks, which weigh the same and cost the same to produce regardless of length?
I know that as I gain more experience as a writer and take on more challenging stories, it takes me longer to tell them, but there’s also the phenomenon referred to in the article: highly successful authors don’t get edited down, even when they should. Partly because their fans will keep buying the books even if they’re bloated and overwritten.
(I am not a highly successful author, for the avoidance of doubt.)
There’s also a phenomenon I’ve noticed in programming (from looking at others’ code, mostly).
When you know very little about programming, you will write simple programs because you can’t do anything else.
When you know an intermediate amount, you may well write excessively long and complex programs, because you can and you don’t know you shouldn’t.
When you’re an expert programmer, you will write simple programs again, only they’ll do a lot more, a lot better.
Mike Reeves-McMillan the expert programs tend to get long and boring as they account for more and more obscure combinations of circumstances.
Like there is a whole category of errors triggered not by the inputs but by the user displaying on multiple monitors.
I thought novel length peaked around the era of the Thomas Covenant (never-ending) series, or Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red/Blue/Green Mars series! Nowadays we seem more inclined to have series of books. Or maybe I just don’t read the super long ones these days?
I don’t know that there are so many chihuahua-killer epic fantasies being written now, but it sounds like books in general are longer than they were.
I have been seeing a lot of new books coming out with the Kindle version priced higher than the hardcover. It almost looks like they have decided to kill the kindle soon.