Writing Shorter

Romance Writers of America recently had an article in their online newsletter about the impact of e-books on the book market. As someone who buys e-books for a library (and helps people set up apps to access them), I can definitely say that even if sales of e-books are down slightly, the number of readers for the format keeps expanding.

Since I also buy print books for library patrons, I think a lot about the differences between the two markets. Many people (like me) get into reading e-books because of traveling. It’s just so much more convenient to load a tablet with several e-books than to lug a bunch of books around. It’s also faster. Even with “one-click” buying, you have to wait a few days to have a print book shipped. Sometimes the instant gratification of getting the e-book immediately is more appealing than waiting for the more satisfying experience of reading in print.

And I do think reading an e-book is a different reading experience. Studies have shown it’s less tiring to read in print. Although those letters on an e-book appear sharp and crisp, it’s actually your brain smoothing out the pixelated edges and making them look that way. They’ve also shown that you retain less of what you read online and it makes less of an impression on your brain. That’s because the physical act of turning a page uses a different part of your brain, and that means your brain records what you’re reading on a deeper level. It’s similar to the way they’ve found that people learn better and retain more when they write notes in cursive versus inputting them on a keyboard. The more parts of your brain you use in a process, the more impact it has and the more likely you are to remember the details.

My personal issue with e-books is that if you want to go back and reread a passage, it’s almost impossible to find it on an e-book. With a print book, you have a physical awareness of where in the book the part you want is located. E-books have a graph at the bottom that tells you the percentage of the book you’ve already read. But that’s meaningless, at least to me. I much prefer the tangible sense of knowing where I am in the book by the heft of the pages I’m holding in my left hand versus my right.

So, what does all this mean for a writer? I’m convinced that e-books have pushed readers to prefer shorter: shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs, shorter chapters, and even shorter books. The RWA study mentioned the number of people who read e-books on their phones. No matter how big your phone or “phablet” is, there are far fewer words displayed on the screen than on a tablet or a print page. I’ve been known to read on my phone, when my tablet battery died or when I was waiting somewhere and had only a phone. Reading a book in these short chunks does seem to change the whole reading process and somehow speed it up. It’s a different experience than savoring a print book while seated in a comfy chair at your leisure.

And having recently had one of my books made into an audiobook for the first time and listening to my whole story, I realized just how very long that book seemed. So, I think audiobooks also encourage us to favor a shorter reading experience.

When I first started out, books in my genre—historical romance—were supposed to be long: at least 100,000 words and often pushing 130,000 words. Then the cost of paper rose and publishers started urging their authors to write shorter books to save money on production. E-books pushed the trend back in the other direction, since it costs about the same to produce a 150,000-word e-book as it does a 50,000-word one. For a while, my word count on my books, which had gone down for years, jumped up again. My last two books were both around 120,000 words. But now I think they would have been more satisfying for contemporary readers if they had been considerably shorter.

I’ve already tried to tighten up my rather wordy, old-fashioned style and write shorter sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. Now it’s time to write shorter, faster-paced books—at least if I want to grab the interest of e-book readers.

Of course, there are exceptions. Epic fantasies and historical novels still tend to be quite long. But maybe even those authors should consider writing shorter. The Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) series by George R.R. Martin is made up of massive tomes. Some die-hard readers read the whole series and savor all the intricate details. But I can tell you, based on library circulation, that a lot of readers read the first couple of books and then say, Heck with it, I’ll watch the TV series to get the rest of the story.

The reading experience of today is nothing like it was even ten years ago. There are so many books, and we all seem to have so much less time. Books are competing with social media, movies on DVD and streaming services, dozens of original TV series, video games, and on and on. I think if we’re going to succeed as authors we have to adapt and change how we write. Write faster (if you can). Write a series (if you can). And write shorter, which for most of us is probably a doable option. It might even make our books better in some ways.