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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is true of self-published, ebook-first writers. In conversations with agents about my novels, I was told that they needed to be "longer" and that ~70K words wasn't enough or wasn't sufficiently "commercial." But in my view the novels were the appropriate length to the material (see http://jakeseliger.com/my-novels/ if you're curious). With ebooks, I don't think readers are subconsciously swayed by length as they are by physical books in bookstores.

Indie authors also often point out that they're better off splitting one massive tome into multiple parts. A novel like Neal Stephenson's Seveneves might've been split into three to five parts, with the first one given away and each additional part $.99 – $2.99 in its ebook edition.

EDIT: Also, I'm not opposed to being commercial, and indeed if I could think of more / better ways to be more "commercial" I'd do it!

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Counter; installments (if you're a well known author) might mean you make less money, b/c people drop off after the first part & never buy the rest. Whereas before, even if they got bored & didn't finish it, they'd already paid in full.

(Installments aside, Seveneves needed heavy editing. Great plot, but probably about 1/3 cruft. I get it; you studied orbital mechanics & it's cool, but the 100th detailed explanation of orbital transfer is too much)

More orbital mechanics? There was a fair amount of that in Anathem as well. Sure the author is supposed to show-us-not-tell-us that characters are smart, but this handwaved now-they-work-a-physics-problem trope only gets about halfway there.

Hah. I actually just had this conversation earlier today with a friend (who I know is interested in this stuff): Me: Have you read Anathem? A decent chunk of the book and the plot is all about orbital mechanics. Him: No, but have you read Seveneves? There's a ton of orbital mechanics in that book. Me: Huh. Well I guess we found his pet subject.

(Btw, I didn't really mind the orbital stuff in Anathem, but I found the repetitive explanations of the many-worlds idea, adding just one tiny new tidbit each time, a little annoying by the end.)

Many-worlds usually annoys me on the grounds of parsimony, but the Socratic dialog on the mountain worked well enough for me to tie the whole book together. (I can remember the broad strokes seven years after reading it, for one thing.) The role of many-worlds was a surprise, but a reasonable one. I didn't feel there was any authorial cheating.

[If anyone else is reading this: warning, spoilers!]

It would have been more satisfying to me if the dialog on the mountain was actually important in the context of the story at all. It was enlightening to the reader, but when Erasmus got to the convox and started talking with people, it turned out that many of them already had basically the same ideas, so he didn't really contribute anything.

Actually, it's hard to think of a point where any idea or action of Erasmus actually changed the outcome of something. He was at the center of everything, but only as a witness. Although I guess the book kind of hints that perhaps nothing that any character except Jad did had any effect on anything, since Jad rewrote it all...

That depends on the cut the author would get from a publisher or leftover profit if they deal with the printing and distributing channels themselves. From the view of the buyer, it's really easy to rationalize the low cost of an ebook, and even if the first part is free, as long as it engages people enough most will come back for the latter parts. A regular physical book would need to engage people on the description to start with to convince people of the higher cost of it. Then there would be the people who sit down and read it through in the bookstore, they would need to be convinced enough of re-readability in order to buy it, or they become lost potential income, same as someone dropping a series after the first free ebook due to it not being interesting enough for them.

That is Stephensons style though. I think what Seveneves needed was a proper ending. It felt like he got bored and just threw together an end in like a tenth of the space it would have needed. Balance between the stories was off by a lot. Outside that, enjoyable.

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