You know that feeling when you finish a good book and you wish it wasn’t over? “I wish that book had been 100 pages longer,” you think. Well no, you probably don’t, because that would have meant 100 pages of padding. A good book defines its own proper length. But wouldn’t it be nice to find a good book whose proper length was really, really long? Let me introduce you to Brandon Sanderson.
“You know, I trimmed it a lot. It’s the right length. It’s the length it needs to be. It’s fair to say it is not a small book.” Sanderson is talking about The Way of Kings , his latest novel. It is, and let’s just fixate on this for a moment, very long, indeed.
One of my favourite New Zealand novels, Nigel Cox’s The Cowboy Dog , is about 60,000 words long. If you put six copies of The Cowboy Dog between one set of covers, The Way of Kings would still be longer. The first time Sanderson showed it to a publisher, the response was a shaky, “Do you know what getting this thing printed and bound would cost us?”
Sanderson laughed, and offered the publisher three smaller books instead. Those three books made his name, attracted a very scary phone call, and made The Way of Kings a viable publishing proposition. But let’s back up a little.
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