How are publishers feeling about shorter novels?

90k is well within the average. Beefy would be upwards of 120K words in length.

That said, your 60k book is probably still too short. And i say probably, because anything can and does happen in this industry. If the story and writing really blows them away, an editor might take it an the shorter length. They may also have ideas on increasing the word count that you haven't thought of, and they may help you get it up to count.

Your best bet is always to stay within the guidelines of the genre. Not everyone can be the exception to the rule.

This is a great question. I always come in short with first drafts of my novels too. Different genres and different publishers have different word-count requirements. 60K is novel-length, but whether it's acceptable for your genre, I don't know. Can you find published books that are similar to yours and compare word counts? I do think many readers want more bang for their buck with a longer novel.

My latest 1st draft comes in around 60K but I'm not content with that. Even though it has a complete story arc, I won't query it at this length. Is there a way you can expand or add sub-plots to increase word count to 70K?

Not a book editor (or, recently, someone who's sold a novel), but I have heard a publisher talk about the minimum word length thing.

Part of the issue is psychology: a publishing house needs to make a book come to somewhere between $X and $Y dollars in order to make a profit on the book.

For $X, there's a number of pages, let's call it X1, where a reader feels they've gotten good value for their money. Similarly, there's a Y1 for $Y.

The problem with a short book is that it risks the reader feeling it's "too short" to be a good value for the price.

Plus, think about it: spine out on a bookstore's shelves, when you can see the title, author name, a smidge of the cover -- what's the first other thing you can see? How thick the book is.

Generally, shorter novels are more acceptable in ebook format because of above costs on print novels. So, currently, if you want to get into print, better try to aim somewhere between those limits. If you want to go the ebook route then your short novel is probably fine.

An option you may want to consider... I am currently reading a novel which is actually two shorter novels combined together - both set in the same world. So, if you could do maybe 40 - 60K words on another story in the same world and submit them together you may have something.

60k strikes me as a little short. I've seen several books published that I would swear are in the 70k range, though. I don't know if you have anything that can be expanded enough to hit the 70k point, but that might be worth looking into.

If your book is a futuristic sci fi thriller, and only 60,000 words, it's probably sorely lacking in the world building department. Go through every line, and ask questions. (Would this character be using a pen, or something else? What kind of plant is she/he watering? What does the food on this table look like? Is the family 'dog' genetically engineered in some way, or an alien species? What does the sky look like--is the dark side of the moon speckled with lights?) Where appropriate, add some detail, without bogging things down. It will make your book more engulfing.

If your book isn't futuristic, you still may need to add more sensory details.

I'd treat everything Dean Wesley Smith writes with a bucketful of salt. He's very opinionated and not always terribly well-informed.

The average length of a novel depends so much on genre that it's difficult to pin it down. When he suggests that "most novels are fine around fifty-to-seventy-thousand words", is he talking about a specific genre? Because otherwise, that advice is pretty meaningless.

There are several threads here which discuss the usual lengths for different sorts of fiction: try searching around for them, I know they exist. But as others have already said, if your writing is good enough then any length is possible. If not--then it won't get published anyway. Just don't pad out the length for the sake of it. If you can't make the book better by making it longer, don't do it.

60k is going to be too short for just about every print line (unless you're talking about Harlequin category imprints, which I'm going to guess you're absolutely not!) If you can get it up to 70k, you'll be a lot closer to an appropriate print length, but 80-100k is even better.

On the other hand, there are a lot of digital-first options available now, and most of those take very short word length (such as 15,000) on up. If this book you've written is absolutely at it's maximum length, without artificially padding the word count and destroying the pacing, you might search out a digital publisher/option to start building a readership, while you're writing the next book (and I'm guessing shooting for a longer word count).

Old Hack said:

Just don't pad out the length for the sake of it. If you can't make the book better by making it longer, don't do it.

Click to expand...

Said so I don't have to. I'll just quote it and nod vigorously.

Old Hack said:

I'd treat everything Dean Wesley Smith writes with a bucketful of salt. He's very opinionated and not always terribly well-informed.

.

Click to expand...

Let's see, he's been a writer for thirty years, along with being one of the best book editors out there, and he's sold a hundred or so novels to many of the top publishers.

He also knows many of the best and current acquisition editors.

Yep, you're right. Not at all well-informed, and lacks any experience whatsoever.

It's even worse with his wife. She's only published forty or so books with top publishers, has only won every major award out there, and has more contacts than a than a stadium filled with near sighted sports fans.

Shouldn't listen to her, either.

You may disagree with what he writes, but he isn't the one who "isn't terribly well-informed."

Angela James said:

60k is going to be too short for just about every print line (unless you're talking about Harlequin category imprints, which I'm going to guess you're absolutely not!) If you can get it up to 70k, you'll be a lot closer to an appropriate print length, but 80-100k is even better.

Click to expand...

I remembered this belatedly:

Cory Doctorow's first novel was about 55k words, but it came out in hardcover. He'd already won a Campbell and was already pretty well known as a result of Boing Boing. So there's an outlier for you, but if you're not similarly well-known....

Jamesaritchie said:

Let's see, he's been a writer for thirty years, along with being one of the best book editors out there, and he's sold a hundred or so novels to many of the top publishers.

He also knows many of the best and current acquisition editors.

Yep, you're right. Not at all well-informed, and lacks any experience whatsoever.

Click to expand...

He's still 100% wrong wrt my genre - no way will a conventional publishing house (i.e. one that intends to issue print editions) buy a fantasy novel at 50-70k unless it is genius. The trend is still for Big Fat Fantasy, and I had no problem whatsoever selling a 140k novel as a debut author.

Bottom end for SF, which can get away with being shorter, is maybe 80k. Contemporary fiction can likewise err on the short side, as can anything intended for an ebook-only publisher like Carina.

Research your exact market - genre, country and format. They vary enormously.

Jamesaritchie said:

Let's see, he's been a writer for thirty years, along with being one of the best book editors out there, and he's sold a hundred or so novels to many of the top publishers.

Click to expand...

Actually, Mr. Ritchie, Dean Wesley Smith is best known for writing media tie-ins, and packaged novels. He's absolutely not regarded as "One of the best book editors out there," which would put him in the same league as Don Wolheim, Dave Hartwell, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Ginjer Buchanan, and Terri Windling, among others.

He and Ms. Rusch were jointly given a Non Professional World Fantasy Award for Pulphouse; that's a discretionary award from the committee.

Jamesaritchie said:

He also knows many of the best and current acquisition editors.

Click to expand...

Shoot, so do I and I don't even write fiction. This is actually a fairly common thing for anyone who at all active in SF/F.

We have these cons, you see. And they have bars.

Do you actually have any citations for any of this, by the way? Did you notice that most of Rusch and Smith's works currently in print are self-published? And relentlessly promoted with some extraordinary assertions that, well, really don't reflect well on them.

Did it occur to you to wonder about how that's going to affect their relationships with editors, agents and other writers?

Jamesaritchie said:

It's even worse with his wife. She's only published forty or so books with top publishers, has only won every major award out there, and has more contacts than a than a stadium filled with near sighted sports fans.

Click to expand...

Actually, as far as I'm aware and having checked the Locus award page, she has a Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2001 for her story "Millennium Babies," and a Hugo for Best Pro editor for F and SF. Rusch and Smith together have a World Fantasy Award for editing Pulphouse. The Endeavour award is, again, a local NW Fan award. It's lovely, but terribly minor.

While I'm fond of the Hugo, and duly nominate and vote, it's hardly "every major award."

You'll doubtless be aware that the Hugo is a fan award, as is the World Fantasy Award; the Nebula is an award from one's peers. She has no Nebula. She's got two Locus awards; that never hurts, but it's another fan award, and one of them was for editing Pulphouse, their 'zine.

Here's Dean Wesley Smith's award page.

There's that World Fantasy "Special Award Non Professional" for Pulphouse. And a Locus award for the SFWA Handbook.

This isn't bad for midlist. But they're both midlist, profoundly, commercially viable midlist. As far as I can determine from the standard industry sources, the "best selling" novels were USA Today ranked, and media-tie ins. That's great, but it's not like the NYT, you know?

When someone says "every major award" in the context of SF and F, I expect a list like that for Le Guin, or Cherryh, or Bujold, or Butler, or Bear or Stross, you know? People who have won McArthur grants, Nebulas (plural) multiple Hugo, Locus awards, and kicked ass and taken names. I expect to go to my local bookstore and see ten or fifteen titles in print—the way I can for Cherryh, Bujold, Butler, Stross and Bear.

Jamesaritchie said:

You may disagree with what he writes, but he isn't the one who "isn't terribly well-informed."

Click to expand...

This is from the guy who didn't know who J. Reid was? The Janet Reid at Fine Print?

The same guy clearly hasn't had any familiarity with Asimov's or Analog or their editorial offices in about the last twenty years?

Here's another take on Rusch and DWS.

Do you actually know anything about Old Hack? The Mod of this forum, and a Super Mod?

Does it ever occur to you that you might actually be speaking out of turn and out of profound self-absorbed ignorance?

Medievalist said:

Does it ever occur to you that you might actually be speaking out of turn and out of profound self-absorbed ignorance?

Click to expand...

Ooh, ooh, I know the answer to this one! "No."

Yep. You win a prize, Kasey! Erm...the prize this month is...erm...a...

Goldfish.

Congratulations!

That important business out of the way--

One of the things I'm really focusing on obtaining as an editor right now is shorter fiction--and I would particularly like to see serialized fiction in novelette and novella lengths in the speculative fiction field. But, here again as was pointed out above, this is for small press, digitally published. For trade publishers or big six, from what I've seen, 60k is anywhere from 15 to 25k too short on general submission guidelines.

Medievalist said:

Do you, actually have any citations for any of this, by the way? Did you notice that most of Rusch and Smith's works currently in print are self-published? And relentlessly promoted with some extraordinary assertions that, well, really don't reflect well on them.

Did it occur to you to wonder about how that's going to affect their relationships with editors, agents and other writers?

Click to expand...

I sighed when I read this thread. Husband asked what was up. I said, "this guy seems to think Dean Wesley Smith is one of sf's top authors."

He tilted his head and said, "Some other universe?"

Which about sums it up, really.

I've followed this field for forty years, and, off the top of my head, I couldn't think of a non-tie-in book DWS had written and had published traditionally. Granted, I'm not Wikipedia, but even that page for DWS is minimalist.

While this diversion about DWS has been entertaining, perhaps we should now try to return to the original topic.

How are publishers feeling about shorter novels?

Well, I'm not seeing any in the bookstores over here, which suggests they aren't buying them, at least not for print.

There's nothing wrong with 60k for SF - a lot of classic SF novels are pretty short. I disagree with Brutal Mustang that a short novel must necessarily have skimped on world-building, as it totally depends on the plot - Fred Pohl's Man Plus is a very slim volume, but since it's tightly focused on a single character in a barren environment (Mars), it doesn't need reams of verbiage.

As has been said, it's going to be a very hard sell unless you already have your name out there. I would try a reputable e-press, rather than padding the book for the sake of hitting a marketable length.

My writing class had a university press publisher come in and talk to us today, and someone asked about this (not regarding science fiction, but just novels in general).
The publisher replied that he had come across novels as short as 20,000 words that had been "made to look bigger"... I think he meant bulked up with illustration or something? And he thought it could work.
And then he said he'd be open to shorter lengths, but he'd usually consider them more of a risk to take on (because of marketability), and since he can only take on so many 'risky' books per year, shorter lengths = shorter odds. Particularly for new writers.

Anne Lyle said:

I disagree with Brutal Mustang that a short novel must necessarily have skimped on world-building, as it totally depends on the plot - Fred Pohl's Man Plus is a very slim volume, but since it's tightly focused on a single character in a barren environment (Mars), it doesn't need reams of verbiage.

Click to expand...

The OP says they wrote a thriller. So I'm assuming there's a lot going on in the book, with lots of characters. But also, I didn't say 'put reams of verbiage'. They may be simply lacking in the bare Rowling-like details. I've read somewhere it's a pretty common problem among new SF and F writers. It certainly has been with me in the past.

OT, but I recently picked up The Boy Who Lived Forever, by Fred Pohl at my local library. The main character was so self absorbed, I found myself eagerly hoping the aliens would kill him!

Plenty of beginners overwrite or underwrite, but without seeing the book, we're just making assumptions. At 60k it could be a thinly written novel or a richly developed novella...

From within the industry (to further Deirdre's point) I hear agents and editors repeatedly saying not to expect that you'll be the outlier, with a 60k book. Which is not to say that you won't, but here's my thought: the reputable agents I know get somewhere between 15 and 20 thousand queries a year. The larger imprints at publishers won't get quite near that, for the post part, but still get thousands and some tens of thousands. If you start off your submission, as someone unknown, with a book that's already 15 to 20k shorter than what they're looking for, you're already starting off from a weaker position. Not the best place to start. But there are still a tremendous amount of opportunities and markets for authors with shorter works, so I don't think anyone who writes below that optimum print-length word count needs to be discouraged, or change the book.

Aside to Anne Lyle: your cover for The Alchemist of Souls is gorgeous. It caused me to click through to read more about the book. I need to mark it down somewhere so I remember to look it up when it releases next year. Angry Robot did a fantastic job with that cover!