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?
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Maybe the required word count was pre-edit and the actual word count post?
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.
I’ve used a plug-in on Calibre to come up with these numbers. It’s described as an estimate, so I have no idea of the accuracy.
No Title Year Words 1 The Colour of Magic 1983 66,550 2 The Light Fantastic 1986 63,610 3 Equal Rites 1987 66,593 4 Mort 73,852 5 Sourcery 1988 79,226 6 Wyrd Sisters 85,562 7 Pyramids 1989 87,746 8 Guards! Guards! 98,207 9 Eric 1990 35,230 10 Moving Pictures 96,702 11 Reaper Man 1991 79,103 12 Witches Abroad 81,261 13 Small Gods 1992 90,906 14 Lords and Ladies 88,636 15 Men at Arms 1993 93,868 16 Soul Music 1994 95,094 17 Interesting Times 93,289 18 Maskerade 1995 85,290 19 Feet of Clay 1996 93,936 20 Hogfather 95,643 21 Jingo 1997 104,757 22 The Last Continent 1998 95,074 23 Carpe Jugulum 98,271 24 The Fifth Elephant 1999 107,594 25 The Truth 2000 104,795 26 Thief of Time 2001 102,571 27 The Last Hero 39,797 28 The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents 64,360 29 Night Watch 2002 113,938 30 The Wee Free Men 2003 73,224 31 Monstrous Regiment 115,905 32 A Hat Full of Sky 2004 79,686 33 Going Postal 117,708 34 Thud! 2005 111,122 35 Wintersmith 2006 89,107 36 Making Money 2007 113,248 37 Unseen Academicals 2009 135,531 38 I Shall Wear Midnight 2010 109,805 39 Snuff 2011 131,465 40 Raising Steam 2013 126,798 41 The Shepherd’s Crown 2015 83,579 I don’t know where Coach Dave got their numbers from, but given that each ends in either 5 or 0, I suspect it’s an estimate of some sort.