Comments on: The Twitterfication of All Things?

By: Headless Unicorn Guy

Headless Unicorn Guy — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:16:54 +0000

And as long as someone mentioned Eragon, don’t forget Twilight (sparkle sparkle sparkle).

Or Left Behind (22 volumes, 40 YA volumes, plus spinoffs).

(And a LOT of Christians use the Bible as nothing else than disconnected one-verse Tweets.)

From what I see in the fiction market, it’s not so much that everything is going to Twitter-Tweets. It’s just that everything has become one-page flashfics, 500+page Trilogy/Series Components, and NOTHING in-between.

By: AB

AB — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:00:31 +0000

Book I’m reading now – First Man in Rome – about 900+ pages. I like the longer ones myself. Too bad I suppose

By: Mark Overstreet » Warning: Preachers, Authors, Publishers

Mark Overstreet » Warning: Preachers, Authors, Publishers — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:18:32 +0000

[...] the book is. Has MySpace, Twitter, Facebook destroyed all hope for the future of the tome? I read an interesting post and considered again the challenging future of all things written. Listen to author [...]

By: Jeremy Pierce

Jeremy Pierce — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:26:03 +0000

I guess that’s what I get for trying to leave a comment while feeding a baby. Someone gets to it before me, and I don’t see it until I’ve posted. I guess the Goodkind info is unique to my comment, though!

By: Jeremy Pierce

Jeremy Pierce — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:21:56 +0000

I can think of a number of recent books that do very well despite being pretty long. The Harry Potter series is a best-seller. The page counts on those are:

Sorceror’s Stone, 309
Chamber of Secrets, 352
Prisoner of Azkaban, 448
Golet of Fire, 752
Order of the Phoenix, 896
Half-Blood Prince, 672
Deathly Hallows, 784

Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series is much longer. It doesn’t sell as well as Rowling’s series, but it’s pretty successful, enough to have generated a TV series produced by Sam Raimi. The first volume is 848 pages. The second is 992. I think those are typical.

The Eragon series is also quite lengthy. The first book is 768 pages. The second is 1056, and the third is 763.

Now these are all fantasy, and maybe that says something. But whatever it says, it doesn’t mean that only fantasy audiences have this kind of attention span, because the Harry Potter audience isn’t remotely limited to hard-core fantasy novel readers. It’s mostly been kids, many of whom had never read a book before, and they got hooked and continued reading the series in order to find out what happens, not caring that for a while each book was getting longer. They in fact generally welcomed that.

By: Sam

Sam — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:02:14 +0000

and yet the last three volumes of the Harry Potter books were:
896 pages
672 pages
784 pages

and the first three volumes of Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance are:
768 pages
704 pages
763 pages