A word count question

There's a loooooooonnnnnnng thread discussing word counts here that you should check out.

Although there are no hard and fast rules for word count on YA novels, it's usually said that 120,000 is at the high end of what the YA market will accept. That doesn't mean that if your novel is 125,000 words long then no one will look at it - if the writing is tight, the plot keeps moving and every word counts, then an agent will be interested. However, once you're over the 130,000 mark, it usually indicates that there's some fat within the novel that needs to come out.

At this point, because you're still working on your novel, there is no point in worrying about word count. As you say, you know that there's stuff you can cut and the important thing at this stage is to actually finish the first draft.

It's at the editing stage that you can think about word count and think about how effectively your writing is telling your story. Usually that means cuts, but sometimes a re-write will mean inserting new material.

For what it's worth, my completed manuscript (a YA urban fantasy) was just under 120,000 when it went into my agent. I'm currently in revisions in line with her comments and I'm looking to get it into the 110,000 - 115,000 zone.

MM

Momento Mori said:

Although there are no hard and fast rules for word count on YA novels, it's usually said that 120,000 is at the high end of what the YA market will accept.

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That makes me wonder if my YA WIP will be too short. It's going to be about 60-65k.

Have absolutely no practical fiction writing experience (aka sold), but I'd hedge my bets and go short. Especially, in this economic climate.

PS: I once had a 120,000+ manuscript. It's been revised and edited down to 85,000.

StephenP said:

That makes me wonder if my YA WIP will be too short. It's going to be about 60-65k.

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You're fine.

Slyest Fox said:

I also know it'll flat-out be hard to tell the story at less than 100k.

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You might be surprised.
I mean, write your draft how you need to write it, but when you're editing, you might find that you have all kinds of scenes you don't actually need.
Even just tightening (getting rid of excess just/that/adverbs/other words you use too many of) can get rid of a surprising number of words.

There was a #askagent chat over at twitter last night, and several agents and editors commented that YA tends to go from 50k-70k, with 80k-90k in the high end of acceptable and 100k too long. There are always exception, of course, but that seems to be the general consensus.

:shrug:

As ever, people get too het up about word count. Like I said, there are no hard and fast rules and for every general consensus about maximum figures, there are a remarkable number of books that get published that are over that figure.

I write YA fantasy and so far word count hasn't been a problem for me.

MM

Sandy Shin said:

There was a #askagent chat over at twitter last night, and several agents and editors commented that YA tends to go from 50k-70k, with 80k-90k in the high end of acceptable and 100k too long. There are always exception, of course, but that seems to be the general consensus.

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You also have to consider genre as well. Like adult, YA fantasy is allowed to be a little bit longer because of world building.

A writer on Livejournal did a word count analysis of a bunch of YA books from YALSA lists and the NYTimes Bestseller list. Begins here, continues in several parts.

Looking at fantasy, Kristin Cashore's "Fire" is about 110,000 words (and 450 pages in hardcover); her "Graceling" was a debut novel and about the same. Carrie Ryan's "The Forest of Hands and Teeth," also a debut novel, was 86,000. Ysabeau Wilce's debut, "Flora Segunda," was 92,000. "The Demon's Lexicon" was 90,000.

(I'm purposely looking at debut novels here because I think it's easier to sell something longer if you have a track record, and because later books in a series tend to get longer... "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" is nearly 200K, "Brisingr" even longer.)

I think for YA, for a new author, 110k is really getting up towards a limit.

Here's a post on this subject I made in another thread last year:

Here are some wordcounts for first YA novels published since 2004:
(Stats from the Renaissance Learning site). Genre in brackets, as far as I can tell for those I've not read:

Cassandra Clare, City of Bones - 130, 949 words (fantasy)
Jenny Downham, Before I Die - 69,548 words (contemporary drama)
Siobhan Dowd, A Swift Pure Cry - 63,954 words (drama set in recent past)
Anthony McGowan, Hellbent - 66,824 words (horror/black comedy)
Melissa Marr, Wicked Lovely - 73,426 words (fantasy)
Stephenie Meyer, Twilight - 118,975 words (fantasy romance)
Simon Morden, The Lost Art - 115,175 words (SF) [had a novella published previously]
Robert Muchamore, The Recruit - 73,689 words (spy thriller)
Patrick Ness - The Knife of Never Letting Go - 112,022 words (SF) [had written adult novels previously]
Peadar O Guilin, The Inferior - 98,774 words (SF) [had short story sales previously]
Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now - 46,920 words (near-future borderline SF)
Jenny Valentine, Finding Violet Park [aka Me, The Missing and the Dead] - 36,244 words (contemporary drama/comedy)

That'll do for now - no doubt there are others which could be added to this list. That's a random trawl through as many debut novels in the last four years I can think of. Like them or hate them (and I haven't read them all) they are *debut* novels, which had to impress an editor and agent when the author was an unknown. I don't know what that shows, except that longer wordcounts are perfectly fine if that's what you need to tell the story (though that's clearly subjective but then so is everything else in writing), and YA novels can be as long as adult novels. On the other hand, they can be shorter than adult novels if needs be too.

Leaving Harry Potter aside, the longest YA novel I've come across is Aidan Chambers's This Is All, published in 2006 - 256,600 words, about a thousand shorter than Order of the Phoenix.