A lot of people have asked me about what is the right wordcount (I make this one word, apologies to those who prefer it as two), and so here are my thoughts on this subject.
The novel has changed in form in many ways over the centuries. If we stick to the period following the rise of Dickens back in the 1830s we can see that the wordcount is also subject to major revisions. Back then and leading into the 1860s, Dickens published fairly long novels (Little Dorrit (1855 - 1857), David Copperfield (1849 - 1850) & Bleak House (1852 - 1853) spring to mind) although most of his novels were published in serial form (more on that later). In the 20th century, particularly in American fiction, we see a drop in wordcount, such as The Great Gatsby (1925) which is something like 55,000 words compared to a lot of Dickens's stuff which is 350,000 words or thereabouts. Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) is also relatively short, and a few years later another short novel came along in the form of Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951).
During the 1970s, books started to put on weight again, and we started to see much bigger stories getting published as we left the brevity offered to us by the modernists for the pulpy epics of the genre writers. However, the internet seems to be reversing this trend, and I have noticed that many of the higher selling books on Amazon are those with wordcounts between 50,000 and 80,000. Gatsby is arguably a novella (though I have seen some people describe works less than 10,000 words as novellas), and these days I think people are happier with shorter books again, even in the genre fiction area. My view is that 120,000 is around the minimum length to be considered a traditional genre fiction novel, while 80,000 would suffice for a literary work.
Razed will wind up being something like 180,000 words I suspect (but nothing concrete yet on that), and that brings me to my second meandering - series vs serials.
Uncle Charles, as I mention above, published his novels in serial form, i.e., a set of stories that were published in a line over time without a proper conclusion until the last one was published. These were very popular in his day, (Stephen King's The Plant is an example of a modern on-going serial novel) but today, series are much more popular, i.e., a complete story with a beginning, middle and end, published, but then the same characters wheeled out again for a new conclusive story the next year, or whenever. These are much more popular in our era, as can be seen in the explosion of popularity for crime books and TV shows where the same characters solve essentially the same crimes over and over every week. Usually, there will be some form of serialised storyline running as a subplot in the background, but for the most part everything gets neatly wrapped up at the end and it's back home for coffee and cakes in the final paragraph.
I wondered if the internet and Amazon might cause a renewed interest in the serial form, but now I'm not so sure. It seems to me that the most popular form is for a story to be wrapped up at the end in toto only for the same characters to be set another challenge in the next book or TV episode.
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