A lot of the earliers DS9 relaunch and late pre Nem TNG books are rather short. Currently most are around 330 pages.
Are writers given page limits, how does this work?
For decades, the trend was toward increasingly longer books. The Bantam and early Pocket novels were generally in the 120-200 page range, but they got longer over time. This was an industry-wide trend, perhaps due to shifting audience tastes and expectations, perhaps because readers demanded more content to justify the increasing price of paperbacks.
But there's room for variation, depending on editorial preference. We aren't given
limits, exactly, but we are given target lengths to aim for, and are expected to avoid going over by more than 10-20 percent. (And it's in terms of word count rather than page count, since the latter can vary depending on font size.) In my experience, different editors preferred asking for different word counts; my contracts from Marco Palmieri generally specified something in the 100,000-word range, while my contracts from Margaret Clark tended more toward the 75-85K range. And you don't want to make a book too long, because if it goes above a certain page count, the price has to be higher -- and if the font is too small, it's hard to read.
