Most of the longest novels I’ve ever read were written by regular people in their spare time. Not well-known authors, just random regular people you run across online who post their works for free.
For example, on the Western half of the world, every once in a while I like going on to StoriesOnline.net because, though the quality of the stories leave something to be desired and you can easily tell they were written by white men, it’s a site where the for-fun English novelists go into very meticulous, down to the fingernail, detail in their stories. Amongst many others of similar length there’s:
- Deja Vu Ascendancy, a wish-fulfilment consensual-incest sci-fi that’s 3,539,816 words long, and that comes to about 12,000 pages. I couldn’t save and read that on my iPad because the ePub was so long it kept crashing the system. It’s the only book I’ve ever read that’s done that. (It’s not a good read though.)
- and Magestic, a time travel kingdom/empire-building current-history economic/political fiction thriller that’s 1,057,185 words long, and that comes to about 3,500 pages. (It’s an okay read.)
There’s also Worm on Parahumans.Wordpress.com, a western superhero web-novel that’s 1,680,000 words long, which is about 5,600 pages. (A lot of people online sing its praises, but I never quite got into it.)
On the Eastern half of the world, when it comes to the wuxia “martial hero” and xianxia “immortal hero” genres authors generally go about publishing their novel online first on Qidian.com in back-to-back mini-chapters of approx. 2,500 words. With these novels ranging anywhere from 1000 to 2000 chapters as the norm that comes to about 5,000,000 words, approx. 17,000 pages. There’s just so many novels that fit the longest novel criteria on there in general that it’s impossible to list them all. (China’s online book market emphasizes quantity of output over quality so they generally tend to be that long. And if/when they get physical book deals they split the novel up into many books for everyone’s sake. Things sort of work along the same lines in South Korea and Japan, but there are differences.)
In more high-minded literary circles, unofficially there’s the much talked about In the Realms of the Unreal by Henry Darger, which is 15,145 pages long (‘unofficially’ because the whole of it hasn’t ever been published, and the part that has – has been broken down into multiple volumes). And to make my point again about the normality of writers who pen such long novels, Darger was a recluse and his work was discovered posthumously.
And there’s also a Chinese Ming dynasty encyclopedia out there in the world that’s 10,000 volumes long, if that counts for anything.
… Long answer short, I don’t think there’s a concrete answer to this because there’s just so many novels out there that the general public is unaware of. (I don’t blame the public for not knowing or caring about any of these long novels; they’re extremely hard to find, the majority of them are subpar, and when you do finally find some you’re actually interested in, you need to dedicate 200 to 300 hours to read just any one of them! You can’t demand that of anyone.)
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I didn’t mention Mark Leach’s self-published eBook Marienbad My Love because it’s more art-piece than novel, but I’ve always found this blurb hilarious:
Marienbad My Love is a publisher’s worst nightmare; just imagine the query letter: “Dear Editor, Please find enclosed my 17,000,000 word experimental novel. Its non-linear story tells of a journalist turned filmmaker who brings upon Armageddon by producing a science fiction version of the French film “Last Year at Marienbad”. Its inclusion of the longest made-up word in the English language at over 4,000,000 letters and a run on sentence of 3,000,000 words is rather impressive…”