I'm also wondering if it might be the e-rom market's resistance to big books in general, and specifically spec fiction variants? I know a couple of agents who work in e-rom and mainstream SFF, who say their e-rom SFF clients generally sell under 90K works.
Another factor is probably possibly that Riptide really EDITS its books. Like, intense edits that I hate while they're happening but appreciate in the long run. That has to be a significant expense for them, and obviously it would be a greater expense for longer books. We get so used to e-books being the world where length doesn't matter b/c the printing costs, etc., don't apply, but the editing costs still do, and for a company that actually edits... if they can't sell the book for a significantly higher price, I can see why shorter would be better.
I get why there might be hesitation to take on really long SFF, but—just to be transparent as to why I'm asking—my own soft sci-fi/suspense is over 80k by 1,800 words, and I'm wrestling with whether and how to hack it down, or whether I should just look elsewhere to submit. (Right now it's hard not to feel like my manuscript is too queer for traditional publishing and yet apparently too speculative for publishers like Riptide.)
That's exactly what I meant by the costs. The editing gets very expensive.
I get why there might be hesitation to take on really long SFF, but—just to be transparent as to why I'm asking—my own soft sci-fi/suspense is over 80k by 1,800 words, and I'm wrestling with whether and how to hack it down, or whether I should just look elsewhere to submit. (Right now it's hard not to feel like my manuscript is too queer for traditional publishing and yet apparently too speculative for publishers like Riptide.)
If I were submitting that I'd call it 80K words anyway - I round to the nearest 5K and have never had a publisher complain that I was misrepresenting things.
To address both points...
1. You can always email and ask regarding the length. You're close enough to the line, I wouldn't imagine it would be an issue.
2. "Too speculative", how? Like focusing more on the spec elements than the queer elements? Because I've not had any issue there.
Hello all! I just wanted to hop in to address the question about our new word cap for SF/F/H.
Lori's and Kate's speculation are both accurate, though there are other factors at work as well. Basically, what we've discovered is that a surprising number of authors take word count caps as a *broad* suggestion. When our cap was at 115K--which is the actual, firm cap we need to keep our print books reasonably priced and still wholesaleable (which is incredibly important because print is actually a--and sometimes the--primary market for queer SF/F/H, at least in our experience)--we received a large number of submissions north of 150K, so we decided to drop the cap. We can and do still buy SF/F/H books up to 115K, give or take, but as those books represent significantly greater risk for us (as discussed in the posts above), we're much more likely to seek them from authors we already work with, rather than from new-to-us authors.
Also, over the last several years, we've discovered which kinds of books we're best at getting into readers' hands, and which kinds of books pose the biggest challenges for us. Contemporary romance, romantic suspense, and romantic comedy fall most firmly within our wheelhouse, and thus we're able to take big risks with those titles. Books outside of those genres are much higher risk for us, and a key way to mitigate risk is to control production costs, which is best accomplished by limiting word count, since editing is a huge expense at our house.
As markets shift--and they always, inevitably do--the genres and word counts we're open to will also shift. (For instance, we no longer accept submissions of any kind under 25,000 words, whereas we used to evaluate submissions as short as 5,000 words.) If you're working on a project you'd like to send to us, but it's currently outside our listed word counts, keep an eye out; they may change from time to time. We're also willing to evaluate manuscripts that fall just a little outside our listed word counts (so you're fine, aetherpen--please submit!), and if you're an author who's already published with us, we're willing to evaluate virtually anything--even a fantasy ms that's 120K