I'm in the querying process right now for the first book in what has always been a YA series of five up to this point. But the more editing passes I make, the shorter the books get, and they weren't that long to begin with. The first one is now just under 50,000 words.
I think it'd be a good idea to combine the five books into a trilogy instead, but how this fits into the querying process has me stumped. I want to keep querying, but until I combine the books, I don't have a definitive word count. Do I stop everything and make the change, and then start querying again? Or can I keep going? If I do keep going, I'm worried about how to communicate the intention without sounding dishonest or sloppy. My instinct says to query it as a trilogy with either no word count or a best guess.
What do y'all think?
I think it'd be a good idea to combine the five books into a trilogy instead, but how this fits into the querying process has me stumped. I want to keep querying, but until I combine the books, I don't have a definitive word count. Do I stop everything and make the change, and then start querying again? Or can I keep going? If I do keep going, I'm worried about how to communicate the intention without sounding dishonest or sloppy. My instinct says to query it as a trilogy with either no word count or a best guess.
What do y'all think?