Glynn Marshes writes:

File this under questions nobody thought to ask — until they did: Who decided how long “it” has to be in order for “it” to be called a novel?

If you assume the answer’s a matter of form following function, you’d have a point. Length is determined, in part, by how much territory the novelist stakes out to tell his story. Start with multiple characters and a handful of plot twists, and you’re up to 70-90,000 words before you know it. Toss in some writerly nuance and it’s easy to add another 10-20K — and there you are, holding the standard trade paperback. Three hundred pages or thereabouts. Or, perhaps a more useful measure: 5-6 hours of consumer entertainment.

Turns out it’s an oversimplification, however, to think that consumer preferences or gawdhelpus “taste” was the sole, or even primary factor in establishing the 6 hour novel as the form’s norm.

‘Twas avarice & greed made me the 300-page literary form I am today!

Nope. As scifi writer and publisher Dean Wesley Smith noted on his blog in 2011, the novel length we consider “standard” was heavily influenced by the economics of print publishing.

It happened like this: until the 1970s most novels were short by today’s standards (30-50,000 words). Meanwhile, however, publishers were struggling with the unintended consequence of the so-called returns system — the agreement publishers have with booksellers to take back books that don’t sell. Begun during the Great Depression, the returns system transfers the risks and costs associated with managing inventories of unsold books from the booksellers to the publishers. But it’s also a kludgy arrangment in a lot of ways, so unsurprisingly, publishers have tried to tweak it over the years to make it more cost-efficient.

And one of the levers they jiggled is book length.

Which makes sense when you think about it. As Wesley Smith explains, publishers wanted to charge more for their books to recoup returns system overhead costs, but they worried that they’d alienate readers if they simply passed those costs along. So they asked authors to write longer books. The marginal cost increase of printing and warehousing and shipping a 300-page book, versus a 200-page book, was modest enough to be absorbed. And readers thought, hmmm this novel’s more expensive but humma humma ding ding, who cares, I’m getting my money’s worth.

So form is still following function, only the function happens to be a business need.

Fair enough.

Authors who didn’t get the memo were sidelined of course, and by the 1980s “novella” was synonymous with “unsaleable.” Forget its (arguably) six hundred year pedigree. “Novella” was back-formed in the literary set’s vocabulary to little more than the novel’s diminutive.

Quick, which one’s the novella?

But the next question is: will e-publishing and/or print on demand affect novel length?

Maybe.

E-books can’t be sized up at a glance, so in theory you could decouple price from heft. I say “in theory” because readers do notice e-book length. I’ve seen angry reviews on Amazon, for example, posted by readers who purchased short stories they thought were novels. They feel cheated and say so.

And with POD, the base, per-unit costs of print remains an issue. It’s simply not viable, at this point, to sell POD novellas priced at, say, $2.00 retail.

Nonetheless, I’ve heard some talk that shorter novels might see something of a revival, and I for one would like to see it happen. For starters, size most definitely does not matter. I’ve recently read The Belles-Lettres Papers by Charles Simmons,  A Cool Million by Nathaniel West, and Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a 1912 novella by James Weldon Johnson. All three were delightful — more than delightful. They have stuck with me every bit as much as the better long form novels I’ve read during the same 12 months or so.

And at the risk of stating the obvious, short form novels are easier to fit into busy schedules. You can easily knock off a 2-hour novel during a plane ride or a quiet Saturday evening.

There may be a market for novels that don’t require as long a time commitment.

And last but not least, it’s possible that — if short form novels were to experience some sort of revival — it might inject a bit of creative juice into the fiction biz in general. Novelists have scratched the same old itch, for the most part, for four decades at so. But now e-publishing and POD have upended the business side of the fiction industry. Maybe next we’ll see some roiling on the art side . . . maybe novelists will discover there are some things that can be better articulated in a form that uses fewer words . . .