Does (your book) size matter?

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“Call me Ishmael” is one of the most famous opening lines in American literature. The protagonist, a green hand newly hired as a seaman on the Whaler Pequod, finds himself on board a vessel captained by the monomaniacal Captain Ahab – a man recently crippled by a notorious white whale that goes by the name Moby-Dick. The novel was published in 1851 to decidedly mixed reviews, and at a dollar-fifty for a bound edition – there was also a three-volume edition available – (about U.S. $37 in today’s money) it was a price most shoppers could ill-afford. That it would go onto become one of the most feted novels in American fiction would be a fact probably both gratifying and surprising to its author Herman Melville, who only saw a few thousand copies sold in his lifetime and had been largely forgotten as a writer when he died in 1891.

Moby Dick is not an easy read either in volume or in style. Weighing in at about 600 pages (still less than The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace), the book delves into such issues as religion in society, the existence of class in America, and multiculturalism of the sea-faring community among other things. It devotes chapters to describing different places and people, long sections to explain the different aspects of sailing, even a chapter on the different types of whales that the Pequod’s crew might hunt.

We are near a quarter in before we meet the antagonistic Captain Ahab, find out his goal for the voyage. It is – bar an ominous warning by a former seaman – the first time the reader gets any real feel for what action is ahead. Add to these considerations the near poetic prose, stylistic flourishes and the well-crafted symbolism and the reader is left with a lot to unpack.

It’s well-worth the effort, and yet. Melville had already had successful publishing experiences with other sea-faring adventures and would have hoped to have done financially well from a novel which took him 18 months to write. Such structure and devices would not, he would have hoped, have stopped the typical reader of his era from enjoying his work. But nowadays, what authors – particularly self-published ones – could expect widespread sales from such a complex work?

For every The Luminaries (just over eight hundred pages) or Infinite Jest (near a thousand with foot-notes) there are potentially hundreds of novels that will settle for somewhere around the 300 to 400-page mark. Among last year’s better / best sellers, literary fiction’s The Miniaturist and the latest Lee Child was just under four hundred pages. It isn’t just a question of how much the writer can produce (and how effective the narrative can run), but also how much attention and time a reader can pay to a book.

With self-publishing, that is even more the case. Romance has long been recognised as the top genre in e-books, with self-publishing super-star H.M. Ward’s first novel Damaged weighed in at around 340 pages before the sequel reached three hundred and twenty. From there, she started the hugely successful Ferro Family series where the typical novel doesn’t break two hundred.

This certainly isn’t the case with all authors – fellow romance titan Barbara Freethy continues to hit at around the 300-page mark – but writing shorter, leaner releases does seem to be the way to go. Turn to my preferred genre – crime and police procedurals – and the three hundred number or under comes up again. J.F. Penn of the Creative Penn website specialises in shorter, fast action books at an affordable price while much-hyped newcomer Matthew Farrell’s debut What Have You Done just makes the three hundred pages again.

So is shorter better? For self-published writers with a day-job there is definitely a limit to how much we can put into a book. Pages spent on characterisation, scene description and the minutiae of the world our characters live in are things our readership might only have limited time and patience for. However, in an era where the post-500 page novel is dropping out of sight, markets and tastes might be a great opportunity for authors. The market itself could be said to be creating tastes, and the tastes are at the moment for shorter, sharper fiction.

In addition, websites like Good Reads almost make reading a competition with yourself, where you can say you’ll read a number of books at the start of the year and see if you can make that number. This makes novels like Roberto Bolano’s Monsieur Pain at only 140 pages an opportunity for a quick-read as well as an opportunity to show off your knowledge of South American authors. And you’ll still have time for the latest dramas on Netflix or to watch the latest instalment of the Marvel Universe.

We might just have to put those nineteenth century classics aside for now. But for our own writing, we might also think carefully about how much time we can put into our own works. Not to mention, how much money we will charge for them.