Changes in literary styles over the centuries

Cafe Society
21

“Light novels” are extremely popular in Japan:

Light novels, also called in Japanese as “raito noberu” or “ranobe” for short, are short, fast-paced novels generally marketed to high school and middle school students in Japan. Often referred to as LN in the English-speaking communities, light novels are often shorter than most Western novels, with its word count coming around 20,000 to 50,000.

Although light novels can be categorically called Japanese novellas, the latter is somewhat inaccurate as light novels are not called “light” because of the word count disparity. Rather, “light” refers to these novels gravitating toward simple, colloquial language. Light novels are also dialogue-heavy, with a distinct style of omitting dialogue tags.

Popular ones become series, with 2 or 3 (or more) releases per year.

There is some market for the Japanese novels translated into English (but not as big as the translated manga market) but I wouldn’t be suprised to see the format grow for native English books.

22

One thing that has changed in recent decades is that stories have been getting longer.

Books are steadily increasing in size, according to a survey that has found the average number of pages has grown by 25% over the last 15 years.

A study of more than 2,500 books appearing on New York Times bestseller and notable books lists and Google’s annual survey of the most discussed books reveals that the average length has increased from 320 pages in 1999 to 400 pages in 2014.

According to James Finlayson from Vervesearch, who carried out the survey for the interactive publisher Flipsnack, there’s a “relatively consistent pattern of growth year on year” that has added approximately 80 pages to the average size of the books surveyed since 1999.

That’s from 2015, and the trend is continuing. As for why, there’s lots of arguments about it.

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Which itself is now changing in the era of streaming, where shows being released as viewable on demand instead of in a fixed time slot means episode length can vary as the plot requires. The first season of Fallout had an episode that was 45 minutes long and an episode that was 71 minutes long, which you wouldn’t have been able to get away with if you were expected to fit into a 60-minute time slot with commercial breaks. It’s also resulted in shorter seasons - 8-10 episodes is now the standard for most “prestige” shows, while just a few years ago 20-30 episode seasons were more common.

24

I wonder if it’s because there are more self-published authors and they don’t usually hire editors.

Or, because electronic books are sneaky about page numbers/length. I don’t even look at a book’s length before I buy it. I’ve taken on some doorstops unwittingly that I probably would otherwise be too intimidated to crack open.

This is probably how I got through Bleak House. Can you imagine if I actually had to carry that tome around?

Just spit balling.

25

My crass opinion is that length of books is correlated with money.

In the Depression era, books got very long; even classic mysteries were regularly over 300 pages and fat bestsellers like Anthony Adverse (500,000 words, later split into three paperbacks) and Gone with the Wind (400,000 words) dominated. In this pre-paperback era hardbacks were reprinted by low-cost publishers like Grosset & Dunlap, which retailed for 50 cents, but were pushed by chains like Woolworths for 40 cents or less, even a quarter if stock remained too long. That was many hours of enjoyment for a very low price.

War-time paper shortages forced the slimming of books. The mass-market and digest paperbacks that appeared in the late 1930s had a fixed price of 25 cents and all but took over the book market, but also suffered from the lack of paper and abridged books to make them fit the thinness, espeically the digest which had only 128 pages.

A faster-paced noir world kept paperbacks thin, especially original paperbacks, which appeared in the late 50s. These were only 40-60,000 words. Prices rose but were kept under 50 cents for the decade. Low-cost hardback book publishers died out but book clubs proliferated, giving out cheap reprints. I got nine James Bond novels for a dollar when joining the Detective Book Club in the 1960s.

Everything changed in the 80s when fat books became the norm again. Writers of thin, taut, fast-moving genre, like Ed McBain and his 87th Precinct series, began bloating their books to two or three times the length. That made them hardback bestsellers but the quality suffered greatly.

P.T. - Post-Tolkien - the fantasy market swelled and so did book lengths. So did sf space battle books, like those of David Weber. How they ground out more than one 1000-page book a year is incomprehensible to me, but length again sold and the market demanded longer and longer stayed in the imaginary worlds. The literary market saw the results and followed.

Ebooks did make a difference. Millions of the so-called books on Amazon are actually short stories, priced to the minimum Amazon will allow. That drives sales. Not quality, but sales. There’s a sweet spot in the middle, but like mid-level movies nobody goes to them anymore.

Sorry. Answering a question with “it’s always the money” is a cliche, but so very often is the best answer.

26

That’s likely part of it. However bigger books appear to be genuinely more popular; I recall reading that publishers of physical books have been using thicker paper because bigger books sell better.