Again, while a long book is probably overwritten, a too short book probably doesn’t have enough detail. It’s also important that publishers aren’t charging $6.99 for a book that’s only 40,000 words (paperback). Readers want to pay $6.99 for a romance novel, and in order for publishers to meet that price point they need to keep the costs at a certain level page and binding size feed into those costs. One is that that’s what readers’ expect and the other are costs. Most of the books you see published fall within the word counts I discussed in an earlier post for a couple of reasons. I reject a lot based on word count, not strictly because I think the range should be 90,000-100,000 words and a 200,000-word contemporary romance is too long, but because a 200,000-word contemporary romance is probably overwritten. I was asked recently, “How much do you focus on word count if the query letter is interesting? I’m not going to submit it to you with a 175,000 word count, but what range will you reject for word count, even if the query is interesting? How strictly do literary agents and/or publishers view the issue of word count when it comes to considering new manuscripts?” What there are, however, are guidelines, rules that can and should be broken, but within reason. Publishing is not like practicing law or medicine there aren’t textbooks on the subject, and except for grammar there are few rules. Of course there are “rules” all over the Internet on the subject (including on this blog), but it never hurts to discuss the matter again.īefore going further I want to stress that there are no “rules” in publishing. I regularly have discussions about when a book reaches the point of being too long or how short is too short. Word count is one of those things that’s always a huge issue, for published and unpublished authors.
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