Talk:Length of a novel

Curiosity
This promises to become a curious article. You might check Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927). I wonder where the interest comes from. The German parallel Wikipedia project has never found any such debate.

Can it be that the English novel/romance/novella history caused the problem? The novel used to be the short genre, it inherited the position of the extended genre of romances in the course of the 18th century, English speakers finally needed a new word for what had been a novel before and revived the word "novella" (once a mere synonym of "novel")... can it be that this story still makes English speakers feel particularly uneasy about the length of novels? The 19th century reinvention of the term "novella" was after all a peculiar step to reinstall a differentiation where one had abandoned it with such success since the 1640s. The enterprise is puzzling, and might deserve a short historical intro and a reference to the relevant sections of the novel article. --Olaf Simons (talk) 14:41, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
 * PS1 Works of enormous length are just a curiosity. The interesting question remains: how sort can a novel be and remain one. The shortest novel I know is the one Snoopy wrote. That's the text and that's the illustration (scroll down to see the black and white four picture version) - wish we could copy that for the novel article. --Olaf Simons (talk) 14:58, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
 * PS2 It would be valuable to note different prizes and how they set the numbers. --Olaf Simons (talk) 15:37, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Different sections: sci-fi, young adult, mystery, romance, etc?
I think it would be helpful to compare and contrast different genres.

I think the guideline for this article should be--at a minimum--books that have their own wikipedia page. I.e. books that are notable to a wide audience. Obviously, there's an arbitrariness to the lists here. But given the huge number of searches on the internet/talk forums/etc there's clearly a demand for this sort of information. --Smilo Don (talk) 02:19, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Weird sentence
From the intro: "Comparative word counts from Amazon.com, which may include preface, introduction, and other inadvertent tallies." -- I'd fix it, but I don't know what it's trying to say. It has no actual predicate. --Buddy13 (talk) 20:19, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Fixed. Perhaps check again and edit as needed.  Cheers, --Smilo Don (talk) 01:02, 21 April 2009 (UTC)