Amazon's new 'payment by the page' policy will just result in longer but likely worse literature

Taut prose is harder to write but often much more pleasant to read than someone who blathers on and on

Katy Guest
Sunday 05 July 2015 12:36 BST
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Pay by the page will only ruin otherwise nice and concise books
Pay by the page will only ruin otherwise nice and concise books

It was the French moralist Blaise Pascal who wrote, “I have made this [letter] longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” In 1657, he knew what many modern writers seem to forget: that taut prose is harder to write but often much more pleasant to read than someone who blathers on and on. I could name names, but I only have about 500 words ….

What a shame, then, that authors are being encouraged to verbosity by a new initiative from Amazon. Self-published authors who sell their work through the site will no longer be paid by the book, but by the number of pages read, and Amazon’s figures imply that the fee will be less than 0.4p per page. Horrifyingly, some authors are reacting to this by vowing to write longer books, full of cliff-hangers and with no contemplation or character development – imagine a vast archive full of Dan Brown and no Thomas Hardy.

I’m all in favour of readers ditching books that bore them: there are plenty more in the library, and the next one you pick up might be the one to change your life. I can also understand the mindset that thinks that fatter books are better value. But they’re not. And paying authors by the page will only serve to encourage poor writing.

I don’t say this just because I am a book reviewer, and we secretly dread enormous books. Nor because children’s books and cookery titles would disappear under this system. And, of course, longer books are not necessarily worse, provided they are not written with heft as a primary goal. A book such as Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (848 pages), which won the Man Booker Prize in 2013, is a lot more than just Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (160 pages and 2011’s winner) padded out to bring it up to £3.39.

Readers seem to agree. Now that e-readers have made it possible to examine people’s reading habits, they show that longer books are most often left unfinished. Recent lists of “most abandoned books” have been dominated by War and Peace (1,024 pages), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1,076), Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace (1,104), and of course Fifty Shades of Grey (576), which was finished by only 25.9 per cent of its e-readers. A rare exception is A Brief History of Time, which clocks in at only 224 pages but feels longer, for reasons that only Professor Stephen Hawking can understand.

Fortunately, in the world of real books, little gems are still successful and easy to find. Take the Penguin Little Black Classics which currently pepper the best-sellers charts, each around 60 pages and costing 80p. I’m also relieved to see that Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, which will be published a week on Tuesday, weighs in at a trim 288 pages. But then, she has had plenty of time to make it good and short.

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