Editing: How and When to Cut
on word count, pacing, and reader expectations
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Dear Kate,
I’m writing a romantasy that’s clocking in at around 136,000 words. Is this going to be too long to get me an agent? Should I even bother, or is self-publishing a better option for me?
— V.
Dear V.,
If you’ve been reading Ask an Author for a while (or even only a little bit of time!) you can probably guess my first response is going to be that there’s no magic formula that can tell you YES you’re guaranteed to get an agent and a seven-figure publishing deal if you just follow these clear-cut steps that everyone knows and agrees on (if only!), or NO you will not get an agent if you commit a querying sin like going over the word limit or failing to adequately prepare your eye of newt in the bubbling cauldron you must keep simmering for twelve days and twelve nights in order to summon an agent before you.
What I can say is that there are some existing conventions within publishing — that exist for reasons, regardless of whether one agrees that they’re good reasons or not — and pushing against those conventions can make your publishing journey harder because it’s one more thing you’re up against in a long list of things you’re already up against.
Norms and expectations for word counts stem from a few different places: reader expectations; pacing and plotting; and from a purely practical standpoint, money and resources. Paper, printing, and shipping costs are increasingly expensive, which makes longer books more expensive for publishers. Bigger books take up more space on bookshelves, so booksellers can’t stock as many as they could slimmer volumes. This may all seem like it’s getting in the weeds — a book should be as long as it needs to be to tell its story! And I agree wholeheartedly. But publishing is a business and it’s important to understand that side of things if you want to be in the business, too. If a sales team can’t make the profit and loss statement work out in their favor, then they aren’t going to green light an aquisition. Editors learn they can’t buy these books, agents learn they can’t sell them, and so authors are discouraged from writing them (and readers don’t get to read them).
“But Kate! I need every one of those 136,000 words to tell my story!”
You know your book! I’ve never read it! You may be absolutely right!
But another reason beyond $$$ that agents tend to have word count ranges in mind is that many books just don’t need to be as long as they are in their initiall telling. A lot of early drafts are saggy in ways that it can take time and practice to see. My novel GREENWICH that’s coming out next year is about the same length as it was in its first draft, but it got cut way down in initial revisions and then when I added more back in in later revisions, the pieces I added were stronger, more focused, and did more work for the story overall than the blah pieces I’d trimmed back. I think it’s Stephen King who talks in On Writing about cutting a manuscript down by about 10% after he finishes his first draft. There might not even be major plot changes so much as tightening up prose and making scenes more muscular by doing more with less. Telling a story is hard (ask me how I know!) and telling a story that readers want to keep reading is even harder. I’m not talking about plot purely in the sense of plot-driven novels but in the sense of a narrative engine — a reason to start a book and to keep reading it until the end.
Fairly or not, I think agents have read enough manuscripts that they sometimes assume a long manuscript hasn’t been edited and refined enough to find the core of the story and tell it in the most effective and compelling way. Similarly, the assumption with a novel that’s shorter than conventional word counts is that it hasn’t been fully developed yet and is going to be missing something — in addition to the practical problem that it’s hard to get readers to drop $30 on a hardcover by a debut author they’ve never read before when the book is <200 pages.
We happen to be in a moment in which readers tend to want leaner prose and tighter plots. I happen to think a lot of contemporary novels are too short and don’t delve deep enough or deliver on the promises of the premise because they haven’t given the reader enough space to really sink into the story. I love a nineteenth century novel or a 1990s doorstop. But it’s hard to make sure that a manuscript really earns and ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIALLY NEEDS all of its words, especially as you start to get over 100K. A passage can be lovely, but is it adding something that all the other lovely passages don’t already cover? In a romantasy in particular — is the romance always moving the story forward? Is the fantasy world presented in a way that’s always moving the story forward, too? Is the plot in this world keeping readers gripped in the way they want and expect from your story? Can anything be tightened, cut, combined, or reworked to make it punchier? This doesn’t mean to rush your story! Pacing is such a Goldilocks problem: not too fast, not too slow, but just right.
“But Kate! Fourth Wing is like 200,000 words and look at how well that’s sold!”
Fourth Wing was not Rebecca Yarros’s debut. She had a long and productive career writing contemporary romance, which means a lot of practice and editorial guidance on pacing, plotting, and voice.
Her publisher launched an entire imprint to get behind this book (Red Tower is part of Entangled). They built it to be a bestseller and threw all their finances and influence behind it. She already came into this series with an agent and editor working tirelessly on each step of the process. It’s not that she had no hoops to jump through (or that agents and editors don’t work tirelessly to get behind plenty of books that aren’t megasellers!). But she wasn’t starting in the slush pile, trying to convince first an agent and then an editor and then an acquisitions team that this could sell.
She wasn’t launching Fourth Wing into a market already saturated with romantasy spawned by the success and popularity of Fourth Wing.
Regardless of what you think of the series, Rebecca Yarros is having one in a million levels of success, so following her publishing plan feels like saying “if I go up that same hill to that same tree I’ll get struck by lightning, too!” It’s a good reminder that “publishing rules” aren’t rules but guidelines, because nothing is set in stone and the market is always changing. Somebody has to win the lottery, after all! But “get outrageously lucky” isn’t a solid writing or publishing plan, and assuming you’re going to be the outlier, ie the rare super-long book that gets picked up, doesn’t feel like it’s setting yourself up for the kind of success that I want for you, V.
The question of whether to self-publish or try the agenting path is a separate and complicated issue. Self-publishing isn’t (or doesn’t have to be) a back-up plan if the querying trenches don’t go as you’d hoped. It’s really about what kind of work you want to take on and what future you envision for this manuscript as well as for your writing life. I wrote about this in a previous post that I think still holds.
Whether you self-pub or try for agents, you want to write the strongest manuscript that you can. I think it’s worth looking at your word count either way, and approaching your manuscript with a truly critical eye.
A reverse outline is one technique I frequently use to help me better see what’s going on in my manuscript, and where I might be able to combine and cut.
I ask myself what’s ESSENTIAL in each chapter and scene, and if I have a whole lot of stuff in there just to get one point across, I try to see if there’s a cleaner, tighter, more interesting way to get there.
In a plot-driven manuscript, ask yourself what’s happening in each scene. Not just what the reader learns, but what’s actually driving the story forward. Where are you telling the story directly, and where are you writing around the story but not quite digging in yet?
If there’s any place that I think “maaaaaaybe this could go” but I’m just not ready to part with it yet, I sometimes just have to get to the place where I can let it go and see the book anew without it in there. Or, cut it and see what happens! Save a copy of your original draft, keep all your cuts in a lovely graveyard on your computer, and know that nothing is permanent and you can always add something back in. Sometimes I’ll cut a whole section, only to realize I need part of it back in again. But maybe that part comes in a different place, or in a different way!
I’m currently working on a new manuscript and cannot for the life of me decide if I need a certain scene leading up to the midpoint or not. I’ve cut it for now, so I can try to acclimate myself to seeing the manuscript without it, but I still have it in a separate document, so I know that if I get to the end of this round of revisions and feel like that scene is missing, I can always add it back in. I’m trying to ask myself what that scene does that is (or isn’t?) essential, if there’s another way that work can happen, and how fast or slow I want the pacing to read at that particular place in the story (ie, how quickly do I want us to get to the turning point in the next scene?). Is it repetitive, or is it important? I don’t know the answer yet, but I just have to trust that I’ll be able to figure it out as I go.
I hesitate to give hard-and-fast guidelines because there are always outliers, but you can apply The Sometimes Rule to this: adult fiction has a sweet spot that’s under 100,000 words, and 70K-90K is even better. Fantasy, sci fi, and romantasy (and historical fiction with sweeping, multi-generational sagas) can go longer: I’d aim for 90K-110K but I think you can go up to 120K. A 70K romantasy will probably be seen as too short for the marketplace, but I think if you can get your 136,000 words down to 120,000 words, you’ll be more likely to capture an agent’s attention without first giving them pause over the word count.
This doesn’t mean to sacrifice your work or your vision, and you can absolutely query your novel as it stands and see if you get any nibbles. Test the waters! But it’s worth taking the time to get really nitpicky about each scene in your manuscript and make sure it’s earning its keep. Even if your word count is “just right” for what agents are looking for, you want to bring that critical eye to your work no matter what.
The most important thing is to keep writing, keep revising, and keep discovering more about the book you’re writing (and apply those lessons to your next book, too!).
Keep going!
Kate