Get shorty: The tight novel trend is here
In which the US publishing industry catches on to the appeal of a slim book
Hello from the Salt Lake City airport, friends! After a week of camping in Wyoming, I’m headed to Bozeman, Montana for writing-related work that I’ll soon share more about. For now, I wanted to forward an article by the writer Lincoln Michel that divulges statistics on a trend that I’ve been noticing: the rise of the short novel.
I think the first buzzy book that tipped me off to the slim novel’s potential was Rumaan Alam’s bestselling “Leave the World Behind.” While that novel certainly wasn’t novella-length, it also wasn’t doorstop-sized, which many mega bestsellers have been for some time. Alam’s book got me excited by the potential for fiction to be more taught, more slim, and less focused on second act plot points than novels have been of late.
Before leaving for Wyoming, I read the marvelous novel “Open Throat” by Henry Hoke that Lincoln Michel references in his post below, and in addition to being super slim (20k words, my friends!) but marketed as a novel, what’s super exciting about Open Throat is that it’s written more as a long poem or meditation than a novel-in-prose and it has an experimental point of view that has drawn readers to the book, instead of repelled them, as some gatekeepers probably feared. From page one, I was cheering for this book’s structure and its content. WE HAVE ARRIVED, I thought mid-read. The era of the tight novel is upon us.
As someone who lived in Europe where short novels and memoirs are the norm and not the exception, I have been waiting for the tides to turn in American book lengths for decades. I myself used to break into hives if it looked like a novel manuscript of mine wasn’t going to hit 90K words. I broke that fear cycle with my novel COSTALEGRE, which was about 50K words, and my last book, a memoir, is 65K or so.
Because I’m in an airport and haven’t slept in a few days (my daughter got quite sick on our camping trip and there were a lot of 3am al fresco pharmacotherapy interventions) I’m going to turn the rest of this post over to Lincoln, who is more well-rested than I am and has handy hyperlinks to recently published works that support the short book trend.
Two things before I share his article: it’s worth considering the rising cost of paper when we mine the reasons for the short book trend, and also, I want you not to worry about this short book trend. If you are writing a doorstop novel, or a novella that you want to be a novella, or you’re somewhere in the middle with a 70K word count for your memoir: Don’t fret. The cream will rise to the top, I really believe that. You just keep on doing your thing at whatever word count it necessitates to get the good work done.
Now over to Lincoln. Have a great weekend, everyone!
Thanks for the note at the end about big fat books. Mine is big and fat and I hope it finds a home. I like reading short and long stuff and short stories as long as it's good.
Thanks for this. And thank for the permission to continue writing doorstops. 😝