How BIG is The Kraken King? (Word Count + Story Length)
Okay, yeah, that title is a total tease. But I’ve gotten several e-mails from readers asking me about the length of the story parts, because there is concern about how much story they are going to get. That’s fair; I should have listed this before. I would want to know what I’m paying for, too. So, here’s the breakdown.
PLEASE NOTE: I don’t have Part 8 finalized yet, so this includes an estimate for that part. If you aren’t familiar with word/page counts and need a comparison — a typical romance novella is about 25,000 words, and a typical novel is about 100,000 words. Printed page counts vary according to book and font size/ebook reader settings, so I’m using my manuscript page count. The word -> page proportions aren’t exact because more dialogue = more paragraphs = adds to the page count. This does NOT include the excerpts from The Iron Duke/Heart of Steel at the end of each published part.
Part 1: ~23,500 words/90 pages
Part 2: ~22,000 words/85 pages
Part 3: ~24,000 words/92 pages
Part 4: ~17,500 words/65 pages
Part 5: ~24,000 words/90 pages
Part 6: ~18,500 words/70 pages
Part 7: ~29,500 words/105 pages
Part 8 (estimated): ~22,000 words/85 pages (ETA: Final word count was ~22,400 words.)
TOTAL BOOK (estimated): ~180,000 words/677 pages (ETA: Final word count was 180,757 words.)
The parts aren’t exactly even because I had plotted out what I needed to accomplish in each part and then wrote the parts individually. Some parts took more words to do what was needed (Part 7) and some took less fewer (Part 4). When I began writing the serial, my editor suggested that each part have a length of 12,000 – 15,000 words, so that the entire serial would fall into typical novel length.
Yeah, that didn’t happen.
April 29, 2014 @ 12:12 pm
I must be addicted, because I didn’t care how many words and I’d easily pay twice as much for what we got. 🙂 But actually it is fun imagining what a lovely 700 page hardcover would look like on my bookshelf. /ponder
Loving III so far!!!
April 30, 2014 @ 10:06 pm
Oh, man — lol, I hope you never have to pay twice as much! I’m glad you feel they are worth it, though. 🙂
April 29, 2014 @ 1:03 pm
Lol you really write insanely long books (NOT a complaint! I love them). I was so absorbed in Gaurdian Demon that I didn’t realize till much later that it was nearly 10,000 ‘locations’ on my iPad. (Yes, this is how I now measure the length of books). How much longer was it than a typical novel? Almost 2x?
Last night… I could have gone to bed at 11. But by then I knew The Kraken King and the Fox’s Den was just an hour away… lol. The bit I read was great.
I am becoming increasingly enamoured of serials (or at least this one) just because it is such fun to talk about these books for two whole months!
April 30, 2014 @ 10:08 pm
Guardian Demon came in at 200,000 words, which is almost exactly 2x the typical length. But there was so much to wrap up! I even cut out three different subplots (one will be a novella later, and I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do with Khavi’s subplot.)
And I’m glad you’re enjoying the serial release! I think it’s a lot of fun, too — usually there might be a little discussion for a week or two after a release (at least for my books) but it’s been a lot of fun to see everyone’s reactions to each part. 🙂
April 30, 2014 @ 10:05 pm
UGH. For some reason, this particular post is being slammed by spammers. I’m shutting down the comments. If you do have any questions, please head over to the discussion thread! http://meljeanbrook.com/sticky-the-kraken-king-discussion-thread/