How Shorter Book Lengths Happened, and a Few Exceptions
- Barbra A. Rodriguez
- Dec 16, 2025
- 6 min read
A fascinating part about (virtually) attending a week-long writer's conference a few years ago was hearing different authors' takes about what length book was considered acceptable. The conference was for historical fiction writers, and 90- to 120,000 words has typically been talked about as the ideal length for these works that often are as much about expansive worldbuilding as a good storyline. But only one of three his. fic. speakers pegged the genre length expectations in that traditional range. The two others mentioned a trimmed-down 80- to 100,000 words instead, with X. H. (Xixuan) Collins adding that an agent had recently told her (in summer 2023) to shoot for 75,000 words.
Why the difference in believed expectations? Setting aside general length variations by genre, I've pegged three overarching factors that might mean falling on the short end of your genre's range is often wiser: publisher preferences, reader preferences, and a wild card that includes an author's cred and writing abilities.
Publishers' Constraints
For publishing houses, I've found they tend to want to keep content below the 100,000-word threshold in general, with more specific cutoffs applying that likely relate to audience interest. The longer a work, the more time and money it takes to be professionally edited, laid out, and printed (all of which they're paying for, starting with the copyediting stage). That's likely a reason that two of the university presses I've worked with sought out my services for early content development, in terms of developmental and voice and style (line) editing. They both asked that several nonfiction works be shortened quite a bit: in one case, it was by about 20,000 words for a hybrid memoir about the development of a field of academic study (to roughly 100k); in the other, by about 10,000 words for a fact-heavy nonfiction work that landed at about 80,000 (when nonfiction works typically run closer to 60k words total).
Publishers might pass on a lengthy book instead due to concern that a writer hasn't got the chops to do better. There is a reason folks admire a 6-word story that has been pegged to Hemmingway, after all, which reads: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." An accomplished writer often has mastered their craft well enough to be both succinct and engaging.
As one example of length's impact, a 2024 (paywalled) survey by a European publishing site supposedly lists having a debut novel of over 120,000 words as being a deal killer for 80 percent of publishers. A typical lengthy work of literary fiction, for instance, might involve anywhere from 60- to 110,000 words.
Readers' Preferences
While there are lengthy exceptions to the rule, such as works of the late J.R.R. Tolkien and Hanya Yanagihara and her character-driven novel, A Little Life, readers' preferences also play into what length books succeed. Many readers nowadays consume fewer books than they used to, and read shorter works than bibliophiles tackled once upon a time. Some of this likely reflects changed priorities, as you can see seasonally, when you consider how books pegged as summer reads tend to be shorter than ones that debut at other times of the year.
Here are some sobering stats behind the "shorter is better" overall trend:
A recent survey by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences found a major drop in the percentage of U.S. readers age 15 and older who spend more than 20 minutes daily on books. Back in 2003, about 22 percent of respondents fell into this "power reader" category; but two decades later, that percentage had dropped to 14.6 percent.
Perhaps not surprisingly, other media likely have replaced this reading time, with more than 4 in 5 Americans surveyed by the academy reading for five minutes or less in 2023; meanwhile, only 1 in 5 spent that little time a day on things like watching movies and viewing electronic content (just 19 percent fell into the non-book consumables category of 5 minutes or less a day).
Just as daily reading times dropped in the AAAS survey, so has the length of different genre. For instance, a review of more than 3,000 bestsellers on the weekly list of the New York Times during a decade found that their average length decreased by 51.5 pages (roughly 12 percent). In addition, research by wordsrated.com revealed that, between 2011 and 2021, works over 400 pages were 30 percent less likely to hit the NYT bestseller list in general. This survey was only for10 years, but the same trend was found when The Sunday Times evaluated top-rated kids' books for a century. Their review of Goodreads ratings found that a popular children's work in the 1930s averaged roughly 61 pages longer than those in the 2020s.
When Lengthy Might Still Fly
If such reports have you disheartened about a complex storyline or hefty background details that you're itching to stick with—despite not writing an epic fantasy—keep in mind that these are general trends. An advantage of publishing a book is having a fair amount of control over the words on the page, particularly if you self-publish. And good writing of any length still can carry the day. For instance, that same Sunday Times survey revealed a brief uptick in children's book lengths in the late 1990s and 2000s.
Being the exception to the rule likely involves having some "ex" factors on your side. A long-time friend is a top marching band instructor and a judge of elite drum corps competitions. He's noted that the difference between developing a good band and a great one involves an exponential amount of extra effort. In the case of writing, this likely would include building up your skills through workshops, critique groups, book coaching, and/or other routes over several years to match the task at hand. In my case during an early career in pr, it took three years of in-depth editing of my press releases before I understood what level of content was needed to capture essential details in these relatively short summaries of complex scientific topics. Once you've got the chops, you then need to apply them to the work at hand. In the case of James Salter, Sylvia Plath, and other authors, that can include doing extensive book plotting to keep the storyline coherent and engaging.
You might also want to evaluate whether a book's topic focus is one many readers would want to spend in-depth time on; your angle and topic don't have to be completely unique, but have to wow enough folks to pull them away from other, potentially easier-to-digest content.
Being exceptionally tuned in to your audience, and having a decent-sized following already, also can add much-needed caché, particularly for nonfiction content. For instance, book coach guru Jennie Nash mentioned in a meeting this week an author whose long memoir likely fits this bill. Florian Gadsby has an image-heavy (read: expensive-to-produce) work called By My Hands that delves at great length into the minutia of becoming a skilled potter. Helping "sell" its 400 pages is the fact that his website draws in about 20,000 followers, whom he notes will snatch up several hundred pots there within five minutes of them being posted.
Being an established author, likewise, can earn you creative clout. A suggested reason for the children's book upswing in the early 2000s related to the longer, later works in the popular Harry Potter series being consumed then (… the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth one, topped out at over 800 pages). And the speaker at the Historical Novel Society's San Antonio conference I'd attended who mentioned working from the highest length range for the genre was Heather Webb, who also happened to be the most established author sharing those details. Meanwhile, X. H. Collins had published one (well-received) novel when she'd been advised to keep her next roughly 15,000 words shorter than typical for that genre.
If tightening up your writings seems wise in the end, or hiring a dev. and line editor early on to help achieve that result, keep in mind that all may not be lost. I've heard of some authors saving less-essential details, subplots and such, for the audiobook version of a work. Their length more typically falls into the 8- to 12-hour range of listening time (equivalent to between 90- to 120,000 words).
By Barbra A. Rodriguez, who coaches intentional living authors on developing their works of self-help, memoir, or other nonfiction, as well as historical fiction, whether at the idea stage, for developmental or proposal feedback, or when an author's ready to self-publish or learn the agent pitching process.
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Learn added nonfiction book-length details and related factors.
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