Colleen, my extraordinary (and persuasive) agent, has made another post on word counts. She's getting more and more queries with high word counts again, and, well, that's REALLY, REALLY BAD. I posted this in the comments field, but I'm putting it here, too, because you NEED TO KEEP THIS IN MIND. (The all caps are there for a reason, folks. Pay attention.)
People, KEEP your LENGTH DOWN. I'm condensing THREE HUNDRED FREAKING THOUSAND words into 120K. That's FORTY PERCENT of the original length. Sixty percent GONE. DO NOT PULL THIS SORT OF STUNT. If your book is even good enough to consider at that length, it will be chopped to pieces just to make it marketable. You will learn a great deal from that sort of edit, including the meaning of pain.
Seriously, take it from someone who's learned all of this the hard way. KEEP YOUR BOOKS SHORT. (This goes for books shorter than 300K, too, btw. Anything over 120K for an adult novel is begging for surgery, and anything over about 90K for an upper-grade YA gets the same treatment.)
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ouch... that's painful (btw I saw you over at her blog). but, how about instead of cutting down the word count, you could just split the book into TWO books? maybe that doesn't really work, i dunno.
ReplyDeleteI'm actually condensing two books, though the first one was too long anyway. It was originally one book, got cut in half, and Colleen pointed out that the first one had no resolution. Hence, I get to condense the thing to death. It's possible; it's just not fun.
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