Dragon Apocalypse versus Brothers Karamazov

While formatting Dragon Apocalypse, I noticed that the collection was about 460,000 words. I wondered how it stacked up to some of the other long books I'd read, and happened to have The Brothers Karamazov sitting on the bookshelf beside me. I looked it up, and it weighs in at a mere 360,000 words. This surprised me, since when I read The Brothers Karamazov I was under the impression it contained all the words, ever. Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful book, an enduring literary classic, and there's a good reason it sits next to me.  I keep many of my favorite books on a shelf beside my computer so I can glance over at them when I'm writing and remind myself of why I'm putting myself through the headache of creating a book.

That said, Dragon Apocalypse: The Complete Collection is, let's face it, an inarguably larger book than The Brothers Karamazov. Just look at the photographic proof!

Plainly, my book is vastly superior in size.

Of course, you'd have to be a pretty shallow person to judge the worth of a book purely by the fact that one author has gone out of his way to bring you dozens of fascinating characters, settings, and plotlines, while the other author lacked the vision and imagination to keep going for another 100,000 words.

There's also the argument that number of words doesn't matter. It's how you use them. So, here's a perfectly objective chart comparing the literary merits of each book:

This chart was created by a Piedmont Laureate Emeritus, so you know it's accurate.

Look, I'm not saying you should skip reading The Brothers Karamazov in order to read Dragon Apocalypse. Both are fine books! You should really read them both. But start with Dragon Apocalypse. It's got dragons. And apocalypses.

Finally, my goal was to get up this morning and announce to the world all the different links that would allow you to purchase DRAGON APOCALYPSE: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION. Alas, when I got home last night, the power was out, which meant I couldn't finish uploading to all the retailers. The power did come back on around 9:00, so I signed in and started uploading... only to have the power go off again, and stay off well into the middle of the night. So, I've spent my morning uploading books to Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and updating the Kindle file after I spotted a few typos created during the formatting process. (For some reason, if the first line of a chapter was dialogue, the opening quote mark was missing.) So, now I'm going to go for a hike, and hope that by this evening I'll have a bunch of links to share.