21 February 2022
For most of the morning, Twitter has been fighting about one of the seemingly dullest things: book word counts. An editor at a commercial-minded independent press tweeted that it broke their heart to see brilliant manuscripts in the 50k to 70k range because adult fiction books had to be 80k-120k and this-in the way of The Discourse-produced some informative tweets but also spiraled quickly into people angrily tweeting about their pet issues. It was proof that self-publishing is the only way to go, or proof that editors are crushing art, or proof that novels suck these days because authors needlessly pad out word count, etc.