Thick Books
Posted by Peat
Received a reader letter today I thought I’d share:
Greetings,
I have a question concerning The Skull Throne.
Seeing as how it will be bigger than The Daylight War, I was wondering: what will the dimensions be? I only have access to the British versions and TDW was as big as the Necronomicon published by Gollancz. So will TST be one massive volume, or split up into parts if it’s going to be bigger than TDW?
Thanks in advance,
Mihael
To which I replied:
Hi Mihael,
There’s no way to know what the dimensions of Skull Throne will be. I am still writing, so the exact length of the book is yet to be determined. It will PROBABLY be lager than Daylight War, but not necessarily.
Also, the dimensions very much depend on the paper stock Voyager uses. You’ll note that Daylight War, which is only 20% longer than Desert Spear, was more than 50% thicker, because they used a different type of paper. I am not usually consulted on these things, so really, until the book goes through final production a few months before release, it’s anyone’s guess how long it will be.
I would be very resistant to any suggestion that the English version be split into two volumes, however. In countries where the translation vastly increases the size of the text, sometimes the sheer logistics of how thick a book spine can be before it breaks and pages fall out necessitates a split. This isn’t the case in English unless Skull Throne turns out to be more than twice as long as Daylight War, which I can assure you will not happen. 🙂
Thanks for writing!
Regards,
Peter V. Brett
I’m not exactly sure that type of paper it entirely at fault here – I actually mentioned it on your facebook wall upon finishing The Daylight War, back in April/May, but:
There was a difference in font sizes between The Desert Spear and The Daylight War.
I was unable to verify is the same is true for The Painted Man, as I was couldn’t acquire a UK hardcover copy at a reasonable price, anywhere. And I wasn’t about to throw £80-100 at a book I’ve read before (in my native language), just to get acquainted with the English names/terms before reading The Daylight War.
In any case, here are some quick calculations I did:
TDS had up to 40 lines per page, TDW had 35 at most, which actually equals the number of lines in the paperback edition of TPM (even though it has much smaller dimensions).
TDW has about 800 pages. Let’s take an average of 3 lines being the difference in number of lines between TDS and TDW.
800 pages x 3 lines = 2400 lines. Divided by 40 (max number of lines in TDS), it equals 60 pages.
So, there is about 60 additional pages in TDW that originated from the difference in font sizes alone.
Add that to the difference in paper types – we get a thicker book that it could’ve been.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that they printed it this way to create an illusion of a very thick book, much unlike the Polish publishers did* (no more than 31 lines per page, with dimensions closer to the English HC than PB, seriously?), just that 800 pages at these dimensions is a lot to hold onto for a person that favors holding books in a single hand, instead of laying them down somewhere for support.
Mind you, I’m not a native English speaker, so there is a limit to how quickly I can read in English, and prior to this year I’ve only read two or three foreign novels in their original language – there were also short stories, but their number wasn’t that impressive either – which means it took me a while to read The Daylight War and I’ve strained my wrist quite a lot because of that. Enough to make me consider getting an e-book reader.
* Back to Polish publishers – you mentioned how other countries were splitting their releases into two parts due to the books gaining in volume during their translation. This isn’t entirely true either – perhaps they do gain *some* volume, but I can’t imagine it to be that much.
The main reasons for the number of pages (at least in Polish version) are font and margin sizes.
Polish releases have no more than 31 lines per page and between six and nine words per line. Most of the “full lines” (in the middle of a paragraph) consist of seven words (eight or nine are very rare – they only contain short words).
That means that even if, by average, a page consisted of seven word lines alone, there would be no more than 217 words per page.
Now let’s see how many that would be for English versions:
TPM PB: 35 lines, 9-13 words per line (let’s take 11 as an average), comes to 385 words per page. Almost twice as many as the Polish version.
TDS HC: 40 lines, 12-16 words per line (most lines have either 13 or 14 words, but let’s take 13), comes to 520(!) words per page. More than twice as many as the Polish version has.
TDW HC: 35 lines, 10-14 words per line (let’s take 11 as an average), comes to 385 words per page. Almost two times more than the Polish version again.
No wonder the books suddenly got longer…
Wow you have far to much time on your hands
Oh my, they all (except for one?) got accepted.
Please remove comments 2-6. (And then, this one too.)
Sometimes you just need to wait for me or Meg to clean the spam filter. We do it regularly.