While that epic thick novel may look great on your bookshelf, showing what an dedicated and accomplished writer you are, it could be limiting your books exposure to a very small subset of readers.
I kind of laughed at this advice when I first starting writing, even though my first two trashy novels (under another pen name) that were 60,000 words did kind-of-OK, selling a couple of hundred. But of course they were in the end total rubbish and nothing I would ever admit to or put my real name on.
No, for my first stab at being a serious author I was going to ignore all this, and all the previous advice I had read, and get everything just right!
So, it was back in July of 2022 and I had just penned the final chapter of this first serious book, after a literal lifetime of procrastinating. The word count was OK by any metric at 110,000, and without any rush I re-read it a couple of times editing and perfecting it. By the third round of changes, my “editing” had actually increased the book to 130,000 words and it was now Christmas!
I had just gone through the initial loop of getting an Amazon author account, giving my financial details (for the $$$ I expected) and then I spent freakishly little time working on the cover, blurb and other marketing bits, because, well, who needs that shit, it will obviously sell itself! So I published it in January and opened my Amazon author metrics page daily as I waited for it to take off. I waited, and I waited, not one sale! By March I knew something was wrong!
Maybe there was not enough action (there wasn’t as it was written for a younger target audience), and the story did not feel quite complete, but none of that actually mattered, because as far as I was aware nobody had read it! No, I could not even find it on the Kindle store even when I searched for it by name, and when I eventually did find it, using every single key word in the search, it was lingering on about page 25 of the search results and it looked out of place and lonely next to it’s peers; the cover was terrible and amateurish, the blurb boring, and my author bio and picture made me look like a desperate hill-billy (no offence to hill-billy’s!) and of course I had priced it at $6.99, because, well what genius gives away their masterpiece!
I had had also categorised it in the young adult, science fiction, and the book next to it on the search list was called “Jimbo the farting robot“. I kid you not, a book for 3-6 years olds, not quite the young adult audience I was aiming for! Why my arrogant-self just assumed it would up there sitting proudly in between the Hunger Games and Harry Potter on page one of the search I do not know, and I guess many a would be author gets to this first bump in the road and goes no further. The algorithm is not your friend!
At the time, my only thought was that it was not “Epic” enough. It was serious Sci-Fi though, just without the usual sex and violence. Well I had almost 120,000 more pages for the sequel penned, and the story really did need to have some action, a teeny bit of violence wouldn’t hurt, and of course bigger is always better!
As nobody had bought a copy yet I withdrew The Phoney War from Amazon (though it was still called The Summer of Reasoning at that time) and spent most of 2023 bigging the story up, adding the sequels with all the action, finishing all the story arcs and by October 2023 (in my mind) I was ecstatic that it was now the same size as a “proper” “real” Sci-Fi novel. I updated to a darker cover, fixed the blurb, found a more rugged, but lovable, bio picture of me (not easy), and re-released it with the same name, same ISBN (naughty) and same expectation.
I of course forgot to change the category so this serious sci-fi novel of 370,000 words was still stuck next to Jimbo the farting robot, and me being me, decided $6.99 was far too cheap so I actually upped the price to $9.99. Marketing my friends is not my strong point!
The rest of my story is spread out over a few posts on this site. TLDR; I still fucked up! So I wrote my next book (A Level of Consciousness), I got my act together with the covers, the blurb and the pricing, revisited The Summer of Reasoning and split it back out into its original three book series, and now I am just happy that I have done everything I can, beyond spending physical money on marketing.
Why Smaller Books Work
The first reason why people give you advice about not writing long books is simple. Most readers are simply unwilling to invest 370,000 words on a new author when there are plenty of good and well established authors already out there. But there are plenty of other good reasons for writing smaller books, especially when you start off:
- An author with one book to their name looks like a failure to some, two or more somehow shows serious commitment.
- Those same people see a series of books like a Netflix series, instead of a single four-hour movie, you have four one-hour episodes and for some reason you are more likely to get traction.
- Lets face it, it is way easier to write a small book than a big book. It is easier to keep track of the plot, the characters, easier to edit it, and a lot quicker to get it to market. (I hope you are reading this Mr George. R. R. Martin!)
- You get more bites of the marketing pie. Instead of one cover and one blurb to entice your potential audience you get three or four, this alone will raise your search profile on-line. (remember the Algorithm!)
- You get quicker feedback on what people like or dislike about your book, a 100,000 word disaster is better than a 300,000 word disaster, and if 200,000 words are not released yet, you may be able to re-purpose them in to another different novel where you also fix any mistakes from feedback.
- You might be able to take a loss on your first book to entice the readers into the series or invest in you as an author, Giving away your first masterpiece might sound like a terrible idea but lots of new authors either give away or greatly reduce the price of their first work as a “taster” hoping to hook you into buying the rest of your books at a hopefully more normal price. (I just ticked that box)
- If your books are in a library then having three normal sized books as opposed to one massive epic, means three people can be reading your books at the same time, rather than one person struggling their way through the novel in the three weeks they get allocated to read it.
- If you do make the book physical, then shorter books are lighter, I know some old people who will no longer read big heavy books as they are too uncomfortable to hold for long periods.
The above list is certainly not definitive, but are the essence, distilled from what I was told, what I have read, and what I have learnt (painfully) as an author. Of course, once you have a fan-base and a few good reviews under your belt people are more likely to invest time in you and then you can go all War-and-Peace on your readers.
Some genres are a little different than others, normal sized for a fantasy book might be over 150,000 words, whereas a Romance novel might be half that. Of course if you already a well known celebrity, have a brand-name, a few thousand followers on twitter/YouTube or just have lots and lots of friends who can write reviews to say how awesome your book is, you can just skip all this advice and publish whatever you want.
