Let's put it this way: in fiction publishing, publishers are rejecting longer-form fantasy novels now because the printing cost for books over, say, 120,000 words starts chewing into the ROI like you wouldn't believe. (Try naming a book under 150k words in the fantasy genre before 2020... unless your name is Sanderson, good luck with that now). That gets exponentially worse in hardcovers (bookstores are BEGGING publishers to stop publishing hardcovers for a lot of genres because they cost so much upfront and don't sell) and books with art? forget about it. My old publisher used to call the best art/cookbooks/photo books vanity projects because they almost always lost money on them, but the owner was really proud to produce them so they'd take a financial loss just to produce a book they respected.
Yeah, it's brutal. I'm literally in a discussion right now about a fantasy novel I'm pitching and whether or not if I keep it lean it'll be a selling point to publishers, though traditionally if a fantasy book isn't at least 150k it's considered too short. (I came out of screenwriting so my books tend to be efficient in length anyway because of how I structure them, but I'm feeling like I'm doing something wrong pitching something that'll clock in around 115k... but the printing and shipping costs if you cross that 125k word count line is... oh man, I think last time I looked at it anything over that amount immediately costs 20% more to print and ship? It's ball-shriveling.)
Yeah, this one sucks. And I can be guilty of it myself because I personally put less value on an e-book than a physical book thanks to the various e-tailers of the world making it clear they can just take your shit away if they want to, the inability to resell or loan things, etc. My mother is a published author, so I see how tough it is for her and I KNOW that e-publishing is almost as expensive considering you need to have the book laid out all over again for an e-reader compared to print and you still need to like.. write the damned book and eat/pay your mortgage. But I can still look at a full-price e-book and go 'eeehhhh...'
I never complain OUT LOUD about e-book pricing, but even I as someone who gets bit in the ass by the same thinking will sometimes catch myself like eeeeeh I don't want to pay that much for a digital book. But when you think about the hours writing, editing, revising, proofing, and laying out the content, that's the real expense. The paper definitely should cost more but most of the investment in the product comes before you ship. (And this is acknowledging that editors are CRIMINALLY underpaid. They fought like hell to make 45k with a job requirement of living commuting distance of Manhattan or London a few years back. There's a reason only about 5% of authors don't have a full-time job on top of publishing.
As a fantasy reader, this attitude has always puzzled me. I jump for joy when a fantasy novel comes in under 500 pages.
I'm the same way - I get overwhelmed if I see a series of five or ten 350,000 word books. I'm old! I don't have time for that! (Some day I'll finish Malazan, I respect what he did there, but boy howdy that's a lotta fuckin' pages).
What's the game here? Are you apes or time traveling humans? Exploring a ruined Earth? Like, what do you *do*?
That sounds super cool to me. You'd think with the success of Joe Abercrombie and ... whoever wrote Lies of Locke Lamora (sorry, author, I have forgotten you at the moment), publishers would be open to 'gritty fantasy' stuff.
I like all of it. I'm a big fan of stuff where I can always find something to read in that setting - like Dragonlance or Warhammer 40k. And I like HUGE stories with a central focus, like Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Chronicles (14 books total, I think). And I like stories that have some heft to them but know when to end, like the Bloodsworn Saga.
Sounds incredible. You had me at Poison Ivy. Then you had me again at Irene Adler. And again at Gambit. I'm always looking for more books that read like "A D&D party..." without being a LitRPG or so silly it may as well have been written for monkeys.