another word count question

The short answer is yes.
If you're querying US agents then 100k is the ideal place to aim for (120k for UK)
My crit partner got a deal with a story that was 128k when she submitted it, the published book is 93k

Actually John Jarrold is on record as saying 140k is a good mark for the Brit market.

However, since from the looks of things Straka is in the US--I'd say try it. When a novel is that long, just chopping wordy passages and rephrasing long sentences might make a huge difference. In any event, in my own personal experiance, I've never gone over a story with a mind to lower wordcount and not ended up with a better product, though this might be because my prose is naturally verbose.

In any event, in my own personal experiance, I've never gone over a story with a mind to lower wordcount and not ended up with a better product, though this might be because my prose is naturally verbose.

Click to expand...

If you're going for the US market, cutting would certainly win you more brownie points.

Of course you could always go the 'send different versions to different agents depending on what they like' , so the shorter one for US and the longer for Brits.

That actually might make an interesting experiment.

/endderail

If nothing else you can at least kill 2.5k, right?

Then maybe another 5k and you're damn close, right?

If you damage the pacing or story when you shorten it, that certainly won't help you get an agent. You're close enough to the target that I don't think the word count alone would stop an agent from requesting your work. Maybe you could cut 3k just so it would be under 130k? I've heard guidelines saying up to 130k for fantasy before.

Just an idea, you probably already did it, but when I needed to par words, I added apostrophes wherever I could, such as changing 'it is' to 'it's', and in a 128k manu, I cut almost 1k words just doing that.

I lost at least 5K just by looking for every form of the verb "to be" and seeing if I could tighten those sentences. In many cases, the answer was yes. And I lost absolutely none of the story, just flabby words.

Your mileage, of course, may vary.

And there's no rule saying an American can't query a British agent. They do things a wee bit differently over there, mind you, so it would be a good idea to research the differences.

My experience was this: My first book was submitted at about 128K and the editor who bought it said it was "flabby." She asked for cuts and other edits, and I managed to get it down to 117K or so. That wasn't easy, but the book was better for it.

I did try to cut it to 100K for another market, a romance market that wanted much lower word counts, and the result was a broken book. So there is a limit to how much you can cut and I believe you when you say that you've found it. ;- )

I guess the lesson is that 132.5K will be a tough sell in the US for a first-time author, but so was 128K and that worked, so if you write a great query, have great sample chapters and find the right combination of agent and editor, the word length is going to be a relatively minor problem.

My fantasy was originally 76K, but after editing, it's up to about 81K. I just don't like to ramble, but would rather get to the point. Now I'm told it's too short for a fantasy! Can't win.

From what I've heard, you can submit a 120K+ ms to American agents--you just have to have a MUCH better story for every K you're over their target number.

If you're sure it would seriously hurt the story to cut it, then don't. So many good stories are fatally wounded when trimmed to the bone to make a word count limitation. Agents are always seriously looking for a great story, so that's what you should concentrate on giving them. Once they fall in love with the story, they'll work with you about meeting any other specifications.

I have a friend whose first novel came in at about 230K (this is about 4-5 years ago). She submitted it to a top-notch agency--who signed her within a month. They worked together and trimmed it to 170K and he subbed it to a major SF/F house--who bought it. Together, the editor and author trimmed it to 115K. My friend was nominated and won several awards with that book.

Give them the story they're wanting and they can make the rest happen with you.

Good luck with it.

American agents will happily accept manuscripts over 100K in total word count if they like the story sufficiently enough. Whether they'll be able to sell them is another matter, but with my previous agent, all of my novels were over the 100K count, with the shortest novel being 109K and others being 140K or over.

Agent Colleen Lindsay's view on word count (and yes she does handle SF/F)
http://theswivet.blogspot.com/2008/03/on-word-counts-and-novel-length.html

Straka said:

I actually rejoice when I find bad writing now. What I did was change my focus - I'm now looking much more critically at dialogue. It's been there that I've found slop to cut and rewrite.

Partly I think the poor dialogue was holdouts from previous drafts, that now appear out of character after all the revisions.

Click to expand...

I did the same thing with the dialogue. It's one of those things I tended to be good at easily, and as a result there was a lot of it. I found a whole scene that I realized didn't actually all have to be there--the specific words weren't as important, and as a result I cut the contents of that scene to about a paragraph, then cut the following scene down because I didn't need the stuff regarding the previous conversation.

Sometimes dialogue takes up so much more space than it has to.

I'm honestly not sure how I ended up cutting as much as I had to for anything. At first it was like, "but it's all so important and awesome!" and then it was like, "okay, well let's see, can this scene start maybe later, and hmm... I guess I could do without this word..." and now it's where I read my drafts of my manuscripts and automatically just go, "search, kill, destroy! Bye-bye, needless sentence."

I still go through my draftwork way more times than it's probably sane to, but I've gotten used to editing something down to size. There is definitelly a limit to how much you can cut from something though. Sometimes when I cut stuff, I find I need to go back and add something else in to make it work, and I can start editing and cut off maybe 10,000 words from a draft, then 5,000, then 3,000, then to the point where each read through only cuts off maybe 1 or 2 hundred. That's the point where I gotta think you just need to leave it alone.

Straka said:

Another detail I need to work on is have more dialogue, the MC needs more face time with certain characters to better develop their relationships. That means reworking the pace and perhaps take 2 scenes and make it 1, while accomplishing the same goals. So Ideally, cut 30 K so I can add 10K of tighter writing.

Sorry for the rant. Back to the trenches!

Click to expand...

I wish I had this "problem." Once my characters start talking to each other, it's Yapyapyapyapyap...