Just throwing the cat among the pigeons here... I recently received a review that commented very nicely on my (conservative) predicted final word count of 75,000 being too short. As I near the end it's actually around 80,000 to 85,000 words so I'm quite happy with it, but it makes me want to reignite the debate over novel lengths.

I was fortunate to get interest in one of my previous novels from Pan Macmillan (word count 85,000), and I had a few nice conversations with a buyer there before we parted ways and he went to work on a celebrity autobiog(!) instead.

He advised me directly that they aim to get first author books ideally of 75000-80000 words because it's cheaper to print when they are taking a risk on someone and customers tend not to pick up huge, fat books from people they've never heard of.

They said that they have to "really fall in love with something over 130,000 words" to pick it up, because they have to use different, bigger print settings and it costs more per copy to print over that size. 130,000 was a cut-off for novels from first time authors, though very rarely they found one longer that they liked or took one over that and editted it down to the right length. Not worth the risk on a "maybe", he told me.

They also said there is a misconception, particularly in SF (not my genre), that a longer book is better and that they get a lot of submissions that they barely look at because the word counts are over 150,000 words.

Finally, he told me that in his experience this was pretty standard across the industry.

Worth bearing in mind if you are at 125,000 words with your new novel and think you have another 25,000 to go!

For years I barely read a book of more than 300 pages.
One of the main reasons was that I cd read the whole thing on a dark winter's day if I felt like it.
And if the book was that good, I didn't want to stop.
There is definitely a marked tendency towards what look set to be very long pieces on this site.
Too many give no hint of what's likely to happen in the rest of the story.
At least, by the end of 7,000 words, i think the reader should have some idea of where it's headed.
Yet, many spill over into long, flowery descriptions and infodumps that only serve to mask the whole point - where's the story?
There are a few reviewers on here who say CUT CUT CUT on virtually everything.
It might look harsh, but in 95% of cases it looks to be good advice.