Floating down to Camelot

Hmm... I do think he might have a point there, actually. (Though of course I wasn't there so don't know exactly what he said or what reasons he gave.) I have sometimes got the impression that authors and publishers have looked at the long Harry Potter books, and decided that "children's fantasy books have to be huge." I've read quite a few that seem to me to be far longer than they need to be - i.e. that are (in my mind) long just for the sake of being long, and would actually be a lot more effective at half the length. I feel this in adult fantasy series fairly often, too - that publishers expect these things to come in trilogies or endless series, but that quite a lot of the tales these authors have to tell would be better told in a single book or a shorter series.