Fat fantasy wordcounts
A fascinating list from Fantasy Faction, showing the wordcounts of fat fantasy series. I got this via a list linked in the comments to Sarah Avery’s post at Black Gate.
Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien
The Fellowship of the Ring: 187k
The Two Towers: 155k
The Return of the King: 131k
Total: 473k
This is not all that much longer than the Griffin Mage trilogy, which was about 120k per book if I remember correctly. I’m a bit surprised that TLotR is not a lot longer than this!
Wheel of Time – Robert Jordan
The Eye of the World: 305k
The Great Hunt: 267k
The Dragon Reborn: 251k
The Shadow Rising: 393k
The Fires of Heaven: 354k
Lord of Chaos: 389k
A Crown of Swords: 295k
The Path of Daggers: 226k
Winter’s Heart: 238k
Crossroads of Twilight: 271k
Knife of Dreams: 315k
Total: 3M 304k (official count)
My God, that’s insane. Every book in this series is INSANELY LONG. I had no idea. I had no plans to read this series ever, but now that goes double. I would have to REALLY LOVE a series to devote that much time to reading it.
No wonder people coined the term “fat fantasy.”
The post gives a few other wordcounts, and indeed there are a lot of looooong books in fat series out there, but the series they didn’t include that I would have been most interested in: Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series and the related series. Every book in those linked series is about twice what I would think of as average, including Carey’s debut novel, which astonished me. Now it doesn’t seem quite so out of line, considering Jordan’s series and the others listed in this post.
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I love long books and series for exactly the same reason, but it doesn't seem like a good sign if you start to lose interest in the main character. And I always feel like I'm pushing the boundaries pretty hard if I go much over 140,000 words, even for adult fantasy. But after seeing some of those wordcounts, maybe I won't worry about it if a book wants to go really long.
Yeah- The Wheel of Time Series started out great and the longer it went on it got worse. Although one of my favorite books in it is towards the end. Mostly, I think if the story is as concise as it can be, it is good whether it is long or short. I think Jordan's failing is that he didn't cut as much as he should have to get to the essence of the story. There were a lot of tangents and side stories that didn't really need to be there. (By the way, I am super stoked you even responded...you pretty much made my day).
> Mostly, I think if the story is as concise as it can be, it is good whether it is long or short. I think Jordan's failing is that he didn't cut as much as he should have to get to the essence of the story. I agree, and though it can be hard to see that you've gone over, that's kind of something your editor should tell you about. And then you should take her advice seriously!
>I am super stoked you even responded
Thank you! But one thing I like about Goodreads is, no real wall between writers and readers!
I actually like a nice long book because that means I can read it for longer. But I understand what you mean when you look at these numbers. It seems slightly insane. :)