As someone who reads and reviews a lot of books, I notice a lot of trends. According to The Storygraph, so far this year, my sweet spot for books floats around 300-499 pages, with 64% of my reads falling into this category (as of April 27th). 12% are less than 300, and the remaining 24% are over 500 pages. In 2025, 16% of my reads were over 500. Long books don’t scare me. Just look at my favorite series, The Stormlight Archive.

But sometimes they bore me! It can be so hit or miss whether a book really uses its 500+ pages to its advantage. For some books, like The Stormlight Archive, these pages are really needed. Sure, maybe each book could be trimmed down by a hundred or two pages, but they all still need to be well over 500 in order to fit in all their content. Wind and Truth is over 1,300 pages! You can’t trim that honker down. Sure, you could split them, but then there would need to be 20 books in the series instead of the planned ten.

A lot of other fantasy/sci-fi books hit 500+ and deserve it. Other than the first two, the books in the Red Rising saga all pass this benchmark. Even though I’m still working my way through the books, I know from what I have read that Brown uses his words well. What we see never seems like filler. He doesn’t abuse our time.

You know who does? What singular man has inspired this article to be written?

Stephen King.

Here are some excerpts from my own King reviews you can find on Goodreads:

Insomnia: “Twice as long as it needed to be, in usual King fashion.”

Fairy Tale: “The beginning was maybe a touch too long, and almost lost me”

Revival: “Dragged on a little too long. I understand… the point… but, in usual King fashion, it could have been shorter”

The Tommyknockers: “I agree with King when he says that there is a better novel within the book, but I still had fun while reading.”

Rose Madder: “King sure does write books, don’t he?”

I promise you guys that I like Stephen King. Most of his books I give between 4-5 stars. But many of the above books sit at 3.5, for the primary reason of dragging on just a touch too long. Fairy Tale took a bit too long to get to the action. Rose Madder had the weird painting sequences. Revival had a lot of interesting segments through the main character’s life, but a lot of them served the same purpose and felt almost interchangeable.

Some of his long books, like The Stand and The Shining, are ones where I wouldn’t change the length. I imagine It is much the same. But a lot of the ones I’ve read just need a little bit of trimming. For me, King is best when his books are around this sweet spot of 300-499 pages. Misery. The Long Walk. Carrie. Pet Sematary. I wouldn’t cut anything from those books, and don’t think they need anything added.

The same is true for a few other books I’ve read recently. I quite enjoyed much of Haylock Jobson’s Heretical Fishing, but found it a bit too repetitive and droning. I would have cut this book down quite a lot. There was a TON of Fischer just fishing or cooking or building or crafting new items. It got a touch boring, but I am not a frequent visitor of the light novel genre, so take that opinion with a grain of salt. I just finished Ryan Cahill’s Of Blood and Fire, which had a few of the same issues. How many scenes of horse/wagon riding do we need? Why do we have so many basic training scenes, but very little bonding between Calin and his dragon?

Are you sensing a pattern here?

I don’t think that page length is necessarily the problem here. I think how these pages are being used is the issue. When too many of the scenes feel the same, it makes the book feel so much longer. I don’t need a million pages of characters walking to get to the next town. There is a lot of power that comes from skipping around.

In my own novel projects, a lot of the in-story time is spent traveling from one town to another. How much of a snooze fest would it be if I described every day of travel? Sometimes as writers, we feel the needs to play out as many scenes as we can, even if there is only the smallest bit of potential for excitement. One of my greatest lessons I’ve learned is the power of skipping a scene. Unsure how to talk about characters checking into their rooms at the inn? Skim over it! Do they have a week of travel ahead of them? Skip ahead and summarize! Iffy about including a scene that feels very rote? Get it out of here! I promise it will do a lot for your writing later on.

What’s nice about writing is we can always go back and add things in later. But it hurts more to need to cut something later. Nine times out of ten I’d rather add in more details than delete something. But both of these are essential to the revision process.

Am I saying that King is bad at revising, and needs me to come in and fix his books? God no. But I am saying that there is a lot of validity to those who struggle to read long books. Sometimes, it’s easier to read punchy, fast paced action than it is to read somethings that sprawls quite a bit. Sometimes our moods lead us towards different lengths and paces. There’s nothing wrong with that.

I don’t think we need to outright ban books that pass 500 pages. But I do think that as writers, we need to decide what we need to keep in our drafts. Page length isn’t anything. It’s not the size that matters, but how you use it, you know? Quality over quantity.

There is something magical about shorter length novels that really blow your breath away. And sometimes, books over 1000 pages can manage to do the same. It’s all about knowing what you have within those pages. For me, I still love this sweet spot of 300-499. But I’m not afraid to find something wonderful on either end of the spectrum.

I may just complain a little bit if you make it too long.

---

This content was written and created by a human, without the use of any artificial intelligence tools. The authors do not authorize this article’s usage in training AI tools. We proudly support the original works of creators and individuals over technology that steals and manipulates original content without consent of creators.