Lawks.
This is all rather depressing, no? Commissioning or rejecting novels on the basis of being 'too short' (though not solely on that basis, obviously).
100k word cut-off point? Where would that leave us, if extrapolated backwards? No Ursula Le Guin - no Earthsea books. No Diana Wynne Jones (she writes adult fantasy too in case anyone doesn't know that, all of it quite 'short' though). No Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett (unless they get a special license for being 'funny'). No T H White or George MacDonald... but why look back so far? We wouldn't have any solo Arthur C. Clarke books and precious little Isaac Asimov. Stephen King would never have published the first Dark Tower book (though I must say he's made up for it since in terms of word count). Anyone else losing the will to live at this point?
I am put in mind of that great Little Britain sketch, where Matt Lucas's pink-clad author keeps shrilling to her amanuensis, 'How many pages?' and gets her to copy out The Bible to make up for the deficit.
I know publishers like to appeal to what 'the market wants', but it's rather unimaginative nonetheless. It's all Tolkien's fault of course... set a trend for books so big they cause paper shortages.
