Queen Michael said:
Azuaron said:
To be fair, I did say 1000+ page novels. You can't really count the complete works of old Mr. Poe as one novel just bceause they're in a collected edition. And if those Crichton novels aren't part of a series then they're not one novel either. Also, I don't get why you count New Spring through Shadow Rising as one. Were they written as one book originally? You never really explained, at least not so that I can understand.
I suppose my point was only made if you're familiar with those books.
All of them were ridiculous examples. The Crichton books are completely different settings and even genres (AS is modern scifi, GTR is historical fiction, and TM near-future scifi).
Game of Thrones is differently ridiculous. Depending on your formatting, they all individually qualify, but we can easily condense them with the "originally conceived as" rule into fewer books (you haven't read five 1,000 page books, you've only read 2.5 2,000 page books!) In particular, Storm of Swords and Feast for Crows were originally written as a single book, then split in half, so the argument is particularly strong there.
Wheel of Time was conceived as a trilogy, then after the first book Jordan convinced his publishers it was a sextet. Then he wrote a prequel and convinced his publishers that it was going to be 13 books. He died before finishing the "last" book, and Brandon Sanderson took up the series. But he couldn't finish it in only one book, so Sanderson wrote three. If this series is decided to be a trilogy because that's how it's conceived, there's no way to split it up to be "these books were going to be book 1, these book 2, these book 3", so I did the next best thing: 1-5, 6-10, 11-15. But, no matter how you split it up, there's no getting around it being one epic story told in multiple parts out of publishing necessity (like Lord of the Rings), so maybe all 15 books are really just a single ginormous* book for our purposes.
As for Poe... well, I could make the same argument against Lord of the Rings. You can't really count the complete trilogy as one novel because they're in a collected edition.
Anyway, my point was that anyone can make a reasonable "rule" about what qualifies as one "book" if you're going to throw out the common sense "this was originally published as one book" because you want to pad your numbers.
Queen Michael said:
I agree that formatting has a lot of influence on the lenght**, but you have to measure lenght** somehow. And it does give you a pretty good idea of what kind of lenght** we're talking.
So why not look at what the publishers do: word count? 300,000 words is the (
generally accepted) industry standard for what makes a novel an "epic", though anything over 250,000 words is often considered "close enough". A quick Google will often give you an exact (or, at the very least, an estimated) word count.
*Holy crap my spellchecker thinks "ginormous" is a word.
**Once is a typo. Three times...
