pet peeve

I'm going to sound like Andy Rooney from 60 Minutes here but I hate it when I get short changed when I buy a book.

The book in question is Janet Evanovich's recently released Twelve Sharp, the newest novel in the Stephanie Plum series. It was published in June and retails at $26.95 though most of the chains routinely discount it 30-40%. I bought it at Amazon sight-unseen. If I'd actually looked at it before buying, I'd not have bought it.

The content of the novel is good if you like the Plum series. It's familiar territory and Evanovich doesn't do anything startling here but if you've liked the other books in the series you'll like this one as well. It's a light frothy read with the sex tease aspects as usual, this time going as far as several purchases in a "marital aids" type store for some humor. Of course the Morelli/Ranger triangle is going as strong as ever but in this book Stephanie must be a little frustrated. I think she only gets laid once. Pity because she spends much of the book sleeping with someone but not getting any action. LOL

My objection to the book isn't the plot, which while a little threadbare is servicable. I object to it being marketed as a novel. It's just not long enough. The page count is 310 but that's such bullshit it pisses me off. It's the most padded book I've seen in 2 years.

For example, all chapters begin with a odd page (1, 23, et cetera) so if the preceding chapter also ended with an odd-numbered page then there's a blank page in-between. That happens 8 times. There's also the huge amount of blank space for other reasons at the end of chapters (10 page equivalent) and then each chapter begins half way down the page (there's 24 chapters so that's 12 blank pages) for a total of 30 blank pages. Out of 310! That's 10% of the book that's missing.

I know, I know. Books are often marketed like that just for the purposes of appearance and I can accept that if it's really for that purpose. In the case of Twelve Sharp though I suspect it's because Evanovich handed in a manuscript that was woefully short on word count and now she's got the pull so she can do what she wants and ignore her editor. I guess authors on the Bestsellers List can do this if they choose to.

My evidence for this? Just look at any page in the book. The lines aren't single spaced-- it's more like a space-and-a-half, the font is larger than usual to the point that they might not have to have a special version for people with impaired vision, and the margins on the page are much wider than usual so the area for text is significantly smaller.

Let's compare Twelve Sharp to another book I have, Executive Orders by Tom Clancy. Now it's true that I'm picking this book because it is quite long but that just gives a nice contrast between the two. The Clancy book is 874 pages long and has 63 chapters. There's no blank pages to be found in this one and the chapters begin near the top of the page. Further, there's 46 lines on every full page. The Evanovich book only has 29. And due to a smaller font, there's an average of 17 words per line in the Clancy versus 11 words per line in the Evanovich.

The upshot of this is that each page of the Clancy novel has about 782 words but the Evanovich has 319. A difference of 40%! And that's 40% per page difference, remember that the Clancy novel also has 472 more pages in it.

So, how does this compute into the real length of the Evanovich "novel"? If we take the 782/page word count of the Clancy as the standard then we just need to calculate the number of words in the Evanovich novel and then divide by 782 to get a real-world page count for Twelve Sharp. Here goes:

310 pages - 30 fake pages = 280 actual pages.
280 pages * 319 words/page = 89, 320 words total.
89,320 / 782 = 114.2 real pages.

So the Clancy novel has 874 pages and the Evanovich only has 114. Almost an 8 fold difference. More importantly, had the publisher formatted the pages as they should have, the 100-150 pages that resulted would have seemed so thin they'd have been forced to adjust the price to reflect the lack of content. This has happened a number of times recently in books by big-name authors like James Patterson and Robert James Waller. It should have happened here also.