There’s an obvious pattern in the length of the adult Discworld books. After a few shorter ones, they all settle in to a length of about 300 pages, with a few outliers at 360-400. Reading Rob Wilkins official biography, it’s claimed that Terry Pratchett was contracted to deliver books of 100 000 words.
Wilkins further claims that they would closely track word count when writing, and relax when they got past 100 000. “Now we’re writing on our own time”, or words to that effect.
The issue here is that no two sources of word count agree, and moreover none of them say the books are as long as 100 000 words. As an example, L-space.org claims that Feet of Clay is 94 164 words, whereas this archived post gives the number 82940. A huge discrepancy. Incidentally, my hardcover copy of the book runs to 288 pages.
Clearly, someone is making up numbers here. Is it Wilkins, L-space.org or Coach Dave on Reddit? What kind of word count would the publisher and Pratchett have been using to come up with 100 000?
Something to consider is that the number of words he submitted may not have been the number published. Perhaps editors were regularly cutting 10k-20k from his books. If they did regularly cut chunks, they may have wanted 100k so that they would end up with at least 75k to publish after editing.
His style is often quite rambling (in a lovely way!). Perhaps it was even more rambling and slightly less lovely when his works were originally submitted to be edited. (Or maybe the editors butchered out tens of thousands of awesome words haha.)
Dunno if that’s what happened, but it’s a very realistic hypothesis.