Splitting your novel in two

thehansell

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I recently finished the second draft of my WIP, and it finally sank in just how long it was. Almost Fellowship of the Rings long. I'm still fully behind the project (cyberpunk action adventure partially inspired by Jane Austin's Persuasion) but there was an itchy little voice in the back of my mind suggesting I split it in two.

So that's been my last month or so. Figuring out where to split it, crafting the first half into a story in its own right with a hundred little tweaks and quite a few new scenes.

But I'm curious. Has anyone else ever done this? What was the experience like? Did it ruin the whole thing or did you end up with something satisfying at the end?

And if you haven't is it something you'd consider doing?
 

ChaseJxyz

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So I'm assuming this means your wordcount is about 180k, right?

I've seen recently on this forum that 90k isn't considered long enough for SFF, so splitting your book neatly into 2 won't work. My first draft is going to be about 200k and I definitely have been anxious about how it's too long, but I can look at it even at this point and find lots of stuff that can be cut out. There's slow parts, there's things repeated, there's some info dumps...if you look at yours, I'm sure that there's going to be things like that, too. It's going to be easier (and serve the story better) to get it down to about 160k than splitting it into 2 90ks.
 

Roxxsmom

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Epic fantasy tends to run long. Some SF is also of epic length.

But not all subgenres of SF and F run as long as epic fantasy. Some authors who self publish also break long works up into segments that are shorter than normal novels but releasing them much closer together. Sort of like serials.

I've noticed that in the past few years the lengths of the SF and F novels I've been reading tend to be all over the place. Some feel pretty short (as in under 90-100k), while others feel more like the epic length I'm used to in fantasy (over 130k or so). Maybe the popularity of e-books gives publishers more flexibility to publish works of lengths that were "too short" or "too long" when the primary means of distribution was bookstore shelves?

Note, this is simply casual observation, and I am not an industry expert. But even ten or more years ago, when everyone was saying here that a new author could never sell a fantasy novel of over 120k words, most of the debut epic fantasy I read was much longer than that.

It's also hard to estimate exactly how long a dead tree novel is, since page count can be altered by things like margin size, font and so on. There are ways of estimating by counting words per line and lines per page, but those methods don't work as well with e-books, many of which don't even provide "page counts" anymore, and a reader might flip through variable numbers of "pages" electronically before the page count in the lower margin advances. You think it would be relatively easy for a kindle or nook app to give a word count to readers and use that to calculate how much of the book they have read, but they don't. It's always some odd calculation of page numbers or of position in the book.

I wish word counts were something included in the data for novels on the amazon pages, but they generally aren't. I assume the information is kept secret because publishers don't want readers calculating whether they are getting their "money's worth" based on word count?

What I'm trying to say in a roundabout way is don't stress too much about page count when writing a book. Try to make the story as clean as tight as it needs to be without sacrificing plot-advancing scenes, plot and character development. Maybe in a really long novel there will be natural stopping point or points midway through the book, but I don't know if it's a good idea to artificially force it.
 
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Sage

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I have rarely been satisfied with a novel that was split into two, even if the author strived to put an "ending" onto the first (which is to say that I've never been satisfied when I knew it was cut, whether because I knew beforehand or it was just so obvious when reading...but I could have been fooled and totally been satisfied when I didn't know the book was cut in half, so my guess is "rarely"). Every time I've come across one that I know of, it was painfully obvious that the book was the first half of a longer book, not a true duology. I think it is much harder than most authors think to take half a story and make it feel like it's its own contained story within a longer series. I have read books that I would have loved if I hadn't felt at the end like it was all set-up for another book, and also duologies that I loved as a whole, but would've been dissatisfied if I had stopped at book one (those were mostly authors I like, and I was willing to give book 2 a chance because of it). If I don't have reason to support the author by reading on, I sour on the series if I feel like the first book is set-up for the second book. This is different from leaving overarching conflict unresolved for the series.

I suspect that the amount of work it takes to make book 1 so separate from being the first half of book 2 that it has a satisfying climax in its own right and doesn't just feel like set-up is probably equal to the amount of work it takes to figure out what you can cut from a doorstopper of a book to make it less doorstoppery. Which route an author wants to take is up to them, but I don't think splitting the book will make it easier on them.

I can't say if yours is too long, as I don't know word count requirements for adult SFF these days, nor how long FotR (just Fellowship?) is.
 

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I did this with a novel I wrote a few years ago. Initially it was a great 128k words doorstop, but fortunately it was in two reasonably equal chunks. Basically the protagonist is a sort of interstellar special agent (think of a female James Bond with warp engines), and she was trying to defeat a conspiracy run by two bad guys. About halfway through she defeats the first one but the second gets away. I split it into two novels at that point, and it's been reasonably successful.

This of course means that there is more backstory in the first than the second. I was a bit worried that readers who read them in the wrong order would be confused by not knowing the world. Curiously some people who have read both in the wrong order actually preferred the second because there was less backstory.

There is a moral here...
 
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lizmonster

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I see most people have already said what I came to say. :)

IMHO, 99% of the time the answer to a too-long book is to tighten it, not to give it more space.

Also, Fellowship is about 180K. That's a little generous for epic fantasy these days, but not a lot. If the tight and your query is good, you might do fine with it. If you can cut it to 160K, I wouldn't worry about the word count at all.
 

Woollybear

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90K might be fine for a SF novel--I was stunned when that RevPit editor said it was too short for the genre, but that was only one editor. She may have been looking for a reason to pass on my submission--I have no great idea what was going on there.

The free metrics provided on Query Tracker include word-count-length requested by different agents. Joshua Bilmes, for example, requests pages from 170,000-word-manuscripts that are queried to him often enough, although most manuscripts pitched to him are far shorter.
 
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waylander

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A few years ago I read a manuscript by an unpublished writer my agent had taken on. It was about 130k - fantasy. Harper Collins were interested and asked the author to expand it to 200k so part of my read was to suggest where it could grow. The final version ended up around 180k and H-C bought it.
 

talktidy

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Never published writer, so take with a pinch of salt.

Another vote for not splitting your novel and working towards crafting the best story you can, without worrying about word count at this point. Keep what serves the story, cut out stuff that does not: repetitions, waffling -- I have a terrible problem with waffling -- and do you have any darlings in your draft that should be beaned with a metaphorical two by four? If there is anything in there that's not earning its keep, then give it the boot.
 

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90K might be fine for a SF novel--I was stunned when that RevPit editor said it was too short for the genre, but that was only one editor. She may have been looking for a reason to pass on my submission--I have no great idea what was going on there.

The free metrics provided on Query Tracker include word-count-length requested by different agents. Joshua Bilmes, for example, requests pages from 170,000-word-manuscripts that are queried to him often enough, although most manuscripts pitched to him are far shorter.

I think people often assume that the fantasy or SF they read comprises the entire genre. A lover of epic fantasy or broad, sweeping SF sagas might assume the subgenre they read and love IS the entire genre.

I know that UF novels tend to be, on average, quite a bit shorter than epic fantasy.

It's also true that fashions and publishing norms are constantly shifting.
 

thehansell

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Thanks for all the feedback guys. It's been a few days since I logged on and you've given me a lot to think about. So to give people a better idea, I think the whole thing was clocking in at about 140k (I mixed up Two Towers with Fellowship).

I was going to have to cut some of the chaff anyway, so I might do that now and see where I am afterwards. Cheers all. Thanks everyone who commented.
 

averyames

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I think it really depends on the structure of your story. If you have one solid plot arc, tightening up as others have suggested might be the way to go. Trimming a 140k down to 120k is completely possible.

That being said, I have split a book in the past, but it was because I realized the "midpoint turn" could actually be tweaked into a satisfying climax; the latter half could easily become a second novel in and of itself. I'd accidentally written two concrete plot arcs into one novel.

Even so, it was still a lot of work to restructure both of them into satisfying books on their own. I rearranged subplots, moved characters around, and tied up some loose ends earlier so they wrapped up in book 1, etc. After all the restructuring and rewrites, my 170k manuscript had become a 105k first book and a 95k second book. (Although I'm still revising book 2 so that number may change).
 

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I know the feeling TC. In my opening post on this site, I said I've completed 5 - 10 novels depending on how you split them up. The shortest of mine is 170k, but they all have natural points where I think they could easily be split up.

Perhaps, that's the key. If you're going to split it, do you have a point where you believe you'd get two satisfying stories? If not, then you probably shouldn't split it.
 

clawyer80

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That isn't too long. My Priest books are both about 120k and I've had reviews comment that they're on the short side.

What's the page count for a 120K book? I always have a better of sense of both length according to pages.
 

Bufty

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What's the page count for a 120K book? I always have a better of sense of both length according to pages.

There is no fixed page count for a book of 120,000 words. A rough rule of thumb is 250 words (if double spaced) per page but it depends on many factors including page size, layout, font etc.
 
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clawyer80

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Bufty's correct, but FWIW: Mine are each about 130K, and the trade paperbacks are about 550 pages.

Using Bufty's rule of thumb, that would put my shortest stories over 600 pages if the layout was something similar to yours.

I have two novels, both around 170K that probably could be split, but I don't yet know how I'd do it. I have another novel that's around 200K that could naturally be split into three. I have one that's about 150K that could very naturally be split into two, and one last novel that's around 200K that would have to stay as one because its like a compendium. I'm sure after they are edited, the word counts would change, but I don't believe they are long because of bloat. They are just long stories that have many phases.

For those of you who have written trilogies or duologies, how did that work for you? Did you have an idea for the entire story from the start or did you finish the first part and add on with other books as necessary? My issue is I basically know the story I want to tell from the start, but I have no idea how long it will be until its written. There's also the fact that I had no idea about acceptable lengths for books when I actually wrote most of these novels.
 

lizmonster

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A story is as long as it needs to be, of course. Word count guidelines are based on how long the majority of published books run, and because of that, there's kind of a feedback loop: books "feel" like they're the right length because most of the books we were all raised reading are more or less that length. And because readers expect a story of a certain size, publishers are reluctant to go out on a limb with something much longer (although it does happen, especially in fantasy).

I'll go out on a bit of a limb myself and say there are very few books in existence that couldn't be cut back. For my first book, my agent at the time wanted me to get to a particular point about 25 pages sooner (TNR double spaced pages, so she was talking about cutting ~6,000 words). I believed it was impossible, but I iterated, and I did it. The book is better for it.

When you're drafting, of course, you shouldn't be worrying about any of this. The purpose of a draft is to get the story out. No matter how much you plan or outline in advance, you don't really know what you have until you've reached THE END.

For my own stuff: I started with one novel and some ideas for sequels. I sold three books, and I had to sketch out the plots for the next two. Each book has a standalone story, but also contributes a piece to a larger story arc. When I wrote the first book I had a vague idea about where it was all going, but I didn't have a lot of plot specifics. I am a pantser, and probably not someone to emulate. :)
 
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In my limited experience a story can naturally accordion back and forth in length. Entire scenes can be cut, and the important bit placed elsewhere. Entirely new elements can be added for depth or some such. I personally believe there is more flexibility in word count than we might intuit.

Most trade books I read have 35-40 lines per page and 10-14 words per line. So, 350-500 words per page, usually closer to 350. Pick up a book on your shelf, count the lines and the words across a few lines.

A 120,000 word novel therefore is ~350 pages.

You can also google the word count of whatever books you have read to get an idea that way. Some are massive tomes indeed.

As far as deciding how to roll out or group stories--it is a good idea to know the general shape of a trilogy. The important part is that each installment 'fill the contract with the reader' which means the story problem you establish in the opening pages is resolved. Introducing/highlighting a larger, external-to-the-story problem near the climax works to set up the sequel without breaking the contract on this book. Readers finish books to resolve the problem laid out in the set up. Luke wants to join the rebellion. The death star must be destroyed. And so making those things happen completes the first installment of Star Wars.

Sanderson has said something like, a trilogy is an expanded three act structure. The second book is the deepening of the story and world, and the third book is the grand resolution to all of the story problems--not just the individual contracts.

Strategically, if you self-publish you will see greater sales by rolling out a new (good) story every few months. Amazon will boost you for some period of time (30 or 90 days) and that's regardless of the length of your book. So, that can come into your planning, as well.
 

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There is no fixed page count for a book of 120,000 words. A rough rule of thumb is 250 words (if double spaced) per page but it depends on many factors including page size, layout, font etc.

It averages 250-300 words per page, depending on a lot of factors so I just average at 275 and it's usually close. Like you said, there are a lot of things that go into it, even how the author writes. A lot of short chapters will have more pages than a few long ones at the same word count.
 

clawyer80

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A guy I work with is a published author on the side. He always says writing the book is the easy part. I'm starting to see what he means. lol
 

Bufty

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Do you mean a self-published author?