I definitely did not think The Little Prince needed to be 20x longer when I read it in French for my French 3 high school class! Nice article. There are always exceptions to the rule, but many books that are , words and way over are quite simply too long. I definitely agree with this, the thought of trying to force my book to be more than k makes my head hurt.
Never bloat your work for the purpose of bloating it. For one, these fatties are usually full of characters and multiple protagonists. They also tend to be slow builds to a quick climax. A lot of readers hate builds that are too slow. I always gravitated towards fatter books. I really like fat books just to grab them like they are a puppy. To grab an agent, a big fat novel could be a disadvantage but in fantasy look alike everyone likes fat books.
I still dunno. It will be interesting to see what my trial readers think of it when it is finished. I am writing it for two reasons, one I am thoroughly enjoying the journey, and two it began as a short example to another writer and on popular demand has become a book in itself.
Would be nice to publish but the story comes first. I write to create. Thoughts on Fantasy. I think the proper length of a story of any genre should be mostly driven by the pace the author wants to give to the story and his personal style. Readers are as diverse as most human groups and some prefer it long while some others prefer it short. Hello all! For a Fantasy book?
Never feel that you have to add more words just for the sake of hitting some word count goal. Let the story be as long as the story needs to be. If you have an idea that you feel will make the book better—follow that idea.
And let that novella be a novella, let that short novel be a short novel—and the same is true on the reverse. Leave it alone—you wrote a long book because you had a long story to tell. Thank you Philip for your advice… to be honest I found out how to give an end to my novel and I almost reach at least 70k… You are right! Pingback: How long does this have to be?
I am sooooo confused by word length issues in fantasy fiction!!! Every other site I have been to has suggested max, max, max at k for fantasy and that was pushing it.
Now, this seemed unrealistic to me since my favorite books Game of Thrones, Wheel of Time, and Outlander all push k. Then for YA fantasy fiction, they say under k, except all of the books my kids are reading are around k to k.
Not 50 years ago. Now a 3 hour plus movie is de rigeur. If you compared to best selling Fantasy Fiction written in the last TEN years, what would it look like?
I bet those counts are longer. I think the best line of this whole thing is that your book should be as long as it needs to be to tell your story. Screw it. I feel your pain, Jenifer. I really do. This is not to say that all authors now do so. The majority still use the same guidelines as beginning writers, because not to, is disrespectful to their publishing colleagues who set them.
The guidelines are there for a reason: economics. Not just managing the economy of word usage, but of greater importance, it is more economical to a publishing house to publish a book of a specific length, than to publish one that is longer.
It costs money to proofread a book twice the length of another. It costs time and money to have an editor work scrupulously with an author to condense their book down to an acceptable word count. It costs a great deal of money to actually bind books. All of these costs can be drastically reduced by a writer demonstrating a professional respect for the guidelines outlined below. There are many writers who choose the more difficult path of convincing publishing professionals that the parameters should be stretched beyond the norm and that their manuscript justifies a larger word count.
Now regarded as classics, these debut novels had to be edited to reduce them to these published word counts. If editors had not taken a chance on these longer reads, their authors would not have had a single word in print. I threw out whole subplots and characters until I had it somewhat close to 80, words. The pain was worth it, because I got selected, met some other great aspiring writers, and received valuable editorial feedback from a publisher.
However, for some agents and publishers I subsequently submitted it to this was still too long, and I received feedback that it could be shorter.
When entering other competitions, I regularly saw suggested word ranges of , words being more the range for YA for manuscripts, sometimes with higher limits of or , words for fantasy, especially epic fantasy. I know fantasy readers who like epic tomes and are drawn to a nice fat book on the shelf, just as I know others who may be put off by that same book.
However, many fantasy readers would feel differently — for example, the author of this article: Does Size Matter in Epic Fantasy , clearly prefers her epic fantasies to be longer. How long do you think a fantasy book should be? Do you prefer shorter or longer books?
I understand my k first drafts have to be cut down, but I wonder how I can possibly get to 90k for example without gutting the life out of it. Like Liked by 1 person. Yes, I think epic fantasy writers often get the wrong impression because we see general book length limits based on other genres genres where agents would be wary of over K. I know I thought a debut fantasy had to be K or under for a long time too I can totally relate to having a K first draft and wondering how on earth to get it to 90K without ruining it!
Thank you so much for compiling all this info, and making visuals with it! This is a really great compilation of info here. I think a lot of publishers look for those long word counts because they a too focused on epic fantasy. This is probably due to the serial nature of such works, which seemed to be better money makers. It seems to be a flawed way of thinking though.
If you look at the Discworld books, they are short, but it allowed Pratchett to write 40 of them! I imagine that was a much better way to make money. The Gunslinger is also a good example — I had no idea it was only 55K when I read it! Sure it has a lot of world building, but I feel like epics are collections where all that building is focused on a singualr plot line. I imagine you could have a comedy epic.
With Discworld you can read the books out of order if not separately. I feel like any book in a in an epic series requires you to read all the preceeding books.
Wow this post is truly amazing!! I love the level of detail!! I have to admit I am surprised publishers say that they want longer novels, given that as you said, agents prefer shorter ones so that they are less expensive to print.
So really for me it just depends on quality. I was also surprised to see some of the lengths when I looked them up. I totally understand being torn on the lengths.
Phew- that is huge!!! Ahh that makes a lot of sense!! Fantastic post — absolutely fascinating insight into the industry. A few of my favourite fantasy and sci-fis are stand-alones. That is why I have yet to start the Wheel of Time series. What a rich, informative post.
The effort you put into this is remarkable. Thank you for writing this up and sharing! The shorter books at the top of your graphs seem like they mostly were published earlier.
There are probably others there that could also be construed as YA, but because so many epics start with young characters it was hard to draw the line… so I just tried to put ones more obviously aimed at young audiences in the YA chart. That would be an interesting topic to look into further… though to survey enough books to prove it definitively would take a lot of time! Like Like. Reblogged this on mariasjostrand.
Very interesting article! Book length is not something I am overly concerned about but I guess subconsciously I do take it into consideration.
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