Having just finished the Stross book today...I agree heartily.

If anything, my gripes about the "incompleteness" of Hammered pale in comparison to Family Trade, which does it more egregiously. You wrapped up things far better than it is done in Stross' book.

That said, however, what there was of Family Trade, however incomplete, I enjoyed.

Okay, okay.

And I read Charlie Stross' apology in his explanation of the genesis of the Family Trade in his journal. So I accept his "apology" and won't blather any more about him on this niggling point...and definitely not about your own work.

You win :)

Kleffel writes as if the big chain retailers are averse to 200,000-word hardcovers by lesser-known writers for no reason other than a desire to be Evil.

It doesn't seem to occur to him that the big chain retailers actually know quite a bit about the behavior of actual human beings in bookstores, and the relative likelihood that those human beings will buy a hardcover priced at $23.95, $25.95, $27.95, or $29.95. (Hint: there's an enormous falloff after $25.95.)

Asking authors to consider splitting their long novels in two is an imperfect solution. Other imperfect solutions would include asking them to cut muscle and bone out of stories that are already the right length--or simply declining to publish those books at all. The best solution, it seems to me, is to warn aspiring writers from the start that despite the commercial success of quarter-million-word bug-crushers at the top of the fantasy market, it's not necessarily the ideal way for a new writer to break in. However, I get the distinct impression that no matter which imperfect solution is deployed, Rick Kleffel will be there to explain that it's the publishers and booksellers who are evil, while writers and readers mysteriously have nothing to do with it.

As for the dire warnings about downloadable e-books, Napster, etc. -- bring 'em on. The day I see a tenth as much online fiction worth reading as there already is online music worth listening to, I'll be actually impressed.

105K. *g* Although Patrick's probably got a better answer. But around 400 MS pages is a nice marketable length--it's on the right side of the $7.00 price break, but looks like a book, not a pamphlet.

my only excuse for the typing in this comment is that it was five AM.

Actually, if you think about it for just a minute, you can probably see very clearly why trying to address these kinds of nuanced, hard-to-quantify, never-perfectly-hard-and-fast market shifts in an official "manuscript submissions guideline" document would be, not to put too fine a point on it, insane. That would amount to taking on far more responsibility for omniscience than we're competent to assume--and, worse, creating the fatal illusion that somebody really knows what's going on. No thanks.

I'm sorry the experience of splitting The Hidden Family and The Family Trade was less than fun, and I don't know what your editor was telling you while it was going on, but what I can tell you from this end is that you're writing a series that has the genuine personal enthusiasm of Tom Doherty pushing it, which is definitely worth a non-trivial amount of inconvenience.

The Family Trade is not the second half; it's the second of several/many. autopope discussed it here.

*nod* I saw Charlie's essay on that. Thanks!

Hey there.

I did get an impression of peevishness from your commentary on the book, actually (which in a bizarre synchronicity, I just read this week; I chased a link there and now I don't recall where from.)

[war stories]

I know what you mean about the waah! no fair! issue as well. My trilogy was always intended to be a trilogy, at least, and I tried for a certain amount of emotional closure in each book--but nowhere in the cover copy does it say "Book one," or what have you. There's one review on Amazon right now that made me grit my teeth when I read it--the reviewer is complaining that the book "isn't too long" that you couldn't have just jammed the two first books together (one's 352; the other's 400; book three is 400 as well) and "if it looks like the publisher is going to stretch it to three volumes, he won't buy them."

I presume he would have bought two six hundred page, thirteen-dollar books where the first volume *didn't* end at a natural break point, though?

I somehow doubt it.

I've got another one with my agent now that's 1200 pages and chunks up seminaturally to two unequal volumes at 170K and 120K. But it's all one book, and it naturally goes to two parts, or five. Not three. Bleh. *g* I'm going to have to do the Behemoth/Cyteen thing, I think, and give them one title with subtitles.

[/war stories]

Um, I guess what I'm trying to say is, I feel your pain. I think the power to correct the problem lies with the book-buying public, though: demand drives supply. I'm just not entirely sure how--if the chunked-up-book thing *is* such a disincentive--to get them educated.

well, as I'm a huge fan of your work, my day is completely made now. *g*

(Read 'em, go mad. Why is it that so many of the cognitively-challenged feel motivated to write reviews there?)

Nobody else will listen?

the demand signals are delayed by a period of years

The demand signals are delayed by a matter of years, and it may take a matter of years to write a book, and by the time it's done, the situation has changed, and maybe the book itself demands something different than what the market desires, and there's that annoying problem where one can only write the books one has in one's head....

So it's nested approximations, matroishka dolls, turtles, turtles, turtles.

I still really like my job most of the time, though. *g*

Or worse, Harriet Klausner reviews. :shudder:

Somebody made it for me about two years ago, modified off one I think is public domain. I don't actually recall who it was, because I was too naive in those days to note things in my icon comments. Dammit.

But you may modify at your pleasure, as far as I'm concerned....

If it was published as a 900-page monster, nobody would buy it.

Actually, the word of mouth that led me to search out Hammered was such that I'd have bought it at that length and its appropriate price point without hesitation. I'd never heard of you before in my life, and dystopian near-future science fiction isn't what I usually groove on, but that kind of praise from people whose taste I trust will lead me to pay for all sorts of things I wouldn't ordinarily notice.

When I'm looking for fiction, I prefer a 900-page monster. When I want compression, I go read a poem. Sprawl is the proper virtue of the novel. Let each form be what it is and do what it does.

I couldn't put Hammered down, and have been hawking it to my various friends and relations. Delicious stuff.

Amazon says Kushiel's Dart is 816 pages. I've noticed that people who strive to be realistic about the current market revise their recollection of the length of that debut novel. The booksellers may be chickening out now, but I don't think they lost any money on Kushiel's Dart.

This is going to turn into a "what Patrick said," comment. There's also a big difference between commercial fat fantasy and less-commercial fat fantasy, and even-less commercial science fiction, and--

Hammered has enough gunfire to be somewhat 'commercial,' but notice it was in the third spot on Spectra's January MMPB list, behind With Red Hands and Natural History. WRH is a police thriller with a spec element that's not challenging to people who aren't immersed in SFF--the sort of thing you find on primetime TV these days ("The Medium"). It's *marketable,* and I'm willing to bet Spectra hoping that series will have a breakout.

My book has a considerably more limited potential audience--although it's written to be accessible both to hardcore SF readers and political thriller readers--the Tom Clancy audience--and it's reasonable to be realistic about how well it would do in comparison with WRH.

Or, in other words, "what Patrick said."

I didn't mean to come off as shaming Tor. My apologies if that's how it sounded.

We're all entitled to speak up for our interests. The bookselling chains are operating on the assumption that stocking fewer very long books will serve their interests. I may be skeptical about that assumption, but ultimately the only thing I can say to them is that the results of their policy irk me. Publishers are in the awkward position of trying to please a reading audience that wants one thing and middlemen who want something else,and finding a balance that keeps your interests viable can't be easy. As a reader, I have my own interests. I want to buy what I want to buy, not necessarily what somebody else finds most expedient to sell me. If Barnes and Noble insists on offering only what's most expedient for them to sell, explicitly and systematically at the expense of what I want to read, I'm entitled to tell them they've irked me. I want big, chewy books that keep me up late several nights running and give me a large cast of characters to gossip about with my husband for hours at a stretch. For me, that kind of book reliably makes life sweet. Yeah, I have my interests as a writer, but it's not like I woke up in the middle of the night and said, "I've got it! I'll saddle myself with the multi-year task of producing a 900-page document! And, market be damned, I'll subject myself to repeated rejection until it sells!" Had I named the project to myself that way at the outset, I'd never have reached the end of the first page. I just started writing the book I wanted to read, the one nobody else was writing. It's my favorite novel ever, and like most of the runners-up for that honor, it's big and chewy, with a large cast of characters. The desire that drives the writing is, first and foremost, a readerly desire.

As an ex-assistant buyer for Borders & Waldens, who has bought fiction and SF/Fantasy, I can honestly say I've never heard any buyer say "I won't put anything above XXX-pages by a non-famous writer on our shelves" either to a publisher's sales rep or over a pint in the pub, or had a manager tell me "don't buy a first novel over XXX pages." Yes, we all consider the profile of a writer, the price of the book and the amount of marketing oomph the publisher is putting behind it as well as how good we personally feel a book is when making decisions about how many copies to buy and where to stock a new title, but fiscal responsibility does not an evil conspiracy make. And now that I work for an independent I can tell you that buyers for independents have to take the same things into consideration. At least the chain-store buyers have a budget that allows them to have the option of taking first novels into their best SF/F stores or even chain-wide when they believe the book has a chance to find *buyers*, independents often can't afford to take many first novels in hardcover and must wait until the paperback comes along.

(I almost wrote *interested readers* but that's not what a bookstore buyer (chain or independent) is looking for, we need books which we believe our customers will want to buy -- as interesting-looking, but expensive books can easily be found for free in the local library and if they ultimately suck, well, you're only out the time it took to read them.)

But hey, look on the bright side, SF/F writers have the option to cut their bug-busters into two or even three books because series works sell in this market. Multi-part novels or series are the exception in mundane/literary fiction circles (even though they were once the norm) (obviously I'm excepting mysteries), so those who attempt the 1000-page Great American Novel face the same hurdles to publication SF/F writers so, but without the range of viable options for publication that SF/F pubs have. I think that SF/F publishers should in general be lauded for finding creative publication options for writers. Sean McMullen's Souls in the Great Machine was originally two separate novels when first published in Oz (I believe) and as a reader I'm certainly glad that Tor chose that solution to bring him to US readers rather than not publishing him at all. Fix-ups have been part of the scene forever, series get collected in one-volume editions and now simultaneous creative commons electronic versions are being allowed. Short story collections are an indispensable and financially viable part of the SF landscape (show me the literary equivalent to Golden Gryphon), whereas literary short story collections generally sell even fewer copies than poetry. This all reflects a creative publishing culture aimed at finding all available readers and enabling everyone concerned to make a living.

Yes, a downside is the waiting until all volumes are published phenomenon (which almost guarantees the sales will be of the mass markets) and yes chain stores can skip deserving books from unknowns all too often and take flyers on barely literate dreck, but cutting books into two isn't a bad alternative to not being published, in this reader's opinion anyway.

Rich Rennicks

I'm coming kind of late to this thread, and there probably isn't anyone reading the damn thing any more, but since the bisection of my own stuff was mentioned in Kleffel's original piece I might as well weigh in. And there's an element to this that no one has mentioned yet.

Regardless of the costs/benefits of book-splitting per se, there's still the issue of being up front with the reader. Tor has traditionally failed to mention anywhere on their split titles that the reader is not, in fact, getting a complete novel; that little surprise is held back until the last page, when you suddenly realize you got half a novel for the price of one. It's misleading, and (I believe) deliberately so; the publishers know a fair number of readers won't buy half-a-book, so they don't tell readers that's what they're getting.

I fought against that when they split Behemoth, and to do David Hartwell credit, he relented: "Book 1" appeared on the front cover, and I got to write both the jacket text and an author's note explaining the split, and the reasons for it. But I had to fight; David wasn't particularly happy about it. Nor was it just Tor; the reason I had to go to bat myself was because my agent at the time wouldn't even raise the issue, and expressed "grave misgivings" when I told him I would (one of several reasons he no longer represents me).

This, to me, is the essence of the discontent; not so much that publishers split books, but that they're not straight with the buyer. They would rather risk leaving the reader feeling cheated than risk losing the sale--and while that strategy makes sense on a single-purchase timescale, it seems really maladaptive over the long term.

But again, I have to credit Hartwell for allowing the note.

PW

Skip the hardcovers and bring them out in fat, high quality trade paperbacks. I would think the industry could make nice editions for under Borders and BN's cutoff price of $23.95. I would prefer to pay around 20 bucks for a good quality paperback than 48 bucks for two halves in hardcover.

This is the compromise I would argue for.

Sorry to be late with the comment, but I came here from Peter's site...

Patrick Cassidy
Portland, OR.