A publishing "hot take" (in brief) - by Matthew Greene

Share a "hot take" about the book world, an opinion of yours that might be unpopular but is a hill you're willing to die on (at least for now).

A couple weeks ago, I took a nice, long train trip in two legs—New York to Chicago, then Chicago to Minneapolis. I must admit, one of my "happy places" in life is an Amtrak observation car where I can devour a good book while sipping snack bar chardonnay and munching on Skittles. (Underrated pairing, but I'm getting off the subject.) I'd packed a healthy stack of books for the journey, and as the trip wound down I was pleased to discover that the last of these books was a cool 252 pages. I had just enough time to breeze through it before I disembarked.

Which brings me to my "hot take," one that might draw the ire of writers and readers alike: most books are too long. Okay, allow me to clarify, because I don't think this is exclusive to the publishing world. I actually think most things are too long: movies, plays, podcast episodes, a limited mystery series where you have to make it through eight episodes to confirm the solution you'd figured out by the end of the pilot (not naming names), and the list goes on. 

Am I just telling on myself, using this blog post to publicly admit that my attention span is shrinking along with the rest of the world's? Maybe. I see the danger in making everything bite-sized, turning works of art into consumable content designed for an increasingly impatient populous. So, I'm balancing my appeal for brevity with an acknowledgment that books are a valuable antidote to the culture of instant gratification and dopamine addiction. But I think they could still serve that purpose if they were 10-15% shorter.

(Side note about a side quest...I was recently hired to write the screenplay for a "vertical mini drama," which is essentially a soap opera designed to watch on a phone screen in 60-second increments. That means a cliffhanger every minute! This is, arguably, too short. Let it be known that I'm not arguing that things be taken to that extreme!)

I know it would be easy to blame the authors for this. After all, we're the ones putting all those words on the page. But there seems to be an expectation (explicit of implicit) that anything less than 70,000 words isn't quite a "real book," that if the page count is under 300 most readers will be loath to pay full price. I know I'm speaking in broad generalities, and we could list exceptions to these rules all day. But suffice it to say, this isn't (simply) an issue of writers being long-winded or indulgent. It's all tied up with commerce, and I think that's a shame.

I should specify here that I primarily read mysteries and thrillers, as I think is true for a lot of us. My partner's fantasy and sci-fi collection strikes fear into my heart, just based on the width of the spines lining our bookshelves. Crime novels tend to be shorter, anyway, since there's a puzzle, a problem, or a paranoia that needs to power the narrative. (And cozies, as I know well, are allowed to be shorter, still.) But, I would argue, the unique expectations of this genre gives us all the more reason to embrace the thin volume!

Some stories—many, I would argue—don't need to be that long. I often find my attention flagging about fifty paged from the end of a book. Yes, I rally myself to forge ahead, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the premise or hook in the early chapters had just enough juice to keep me interested for a certain number of words/pages/hours. And often, I can feel that juice run out. In these moments, I find myself wondering if it was the author's choice to stretch a story concept beyond its natural capacity or if they felt pressured to do so by readers, editors, agents, etc. 

Or, as is certainly possible, I may just be wrong. I may be alone in feeling like most books would be stronger if they were fifty pages shorter. I may be in the market for a good novella. And—most frightening of all—I may be guilty of this myself with my current work in progress. 

That 252-page mystery that capped off my trip was exactly the right length, and I was grateful for that. Other books, of course, take longer to do justice to their stories. Hot takes aside, my sincere wish is that my fellow writers feel free to keep it brief, if that's what the story requires. 

And if you have any low-page-count, high-impact mysteries and thrillers to recommend, drop them in the comments below!