Does size matter?
Writers are a bit obsessed by numbers. I’m not talking about sales figures for our books (although we can get pretty obsessive about those too).
Get more than one author in a room and within a couple of minutes someone is going to mention “word count”.
Word counts haunt our dreams and our nightmares. How many words can we write in a day? How many words of the work in progress have we written – and worse – how many do we still have to write.
Publishers need to know how many words are in a book. When producing a paper book – the number of words impacts the production cost. How much paper and ink is needed.
When buying a paper book, we can see at a glance that Stephen King writes books the size of house bricks. But does that make Under the Dome a better book than To Kill A Mockingbird (I loved them both – for different reasons, but that’s another blog).
The price for the bestselling house brick – £9.99 for 896 pages.
A Pulitzer Prize winner goes for £6.99 for 320 pages. (Although – to be fair, prices vary from place to place)
So – 896 pages at 400 words per page = 358,000 words (more or less) Selling for 9.99 is about 358 words per penny (see – obsessed)… while 320 pages at 400 words per page….
STOP IT!
When buying e-books, there size of the book is irrelevant. There is a file size and print book page count given online – but who ever looks at that?
Prices vary even more wildly for e-books than for paperbacks.
When reading on my Kindle, I got told how much of the book I have read – but that really doesn’t give me a feel for the size of the book.
So what I guess I am saying here is that size doesn’t matter. (Where have I heard that before?)
Enjoyment matters. I have re and re-read To Kill A Mockingbird. It doesn’t take long, but I get a little more from it each time. I took a long time to read Under the Dome – but found it fascinating and thought provoking.
So – is it time we stopped being so obsessed with numbers? Maybe – but not right now – because I have to go away and write another thousand words to hit my daily word count.