On Wordcounts For Traditional Debuts (and other things.)
I know that thread from yesterday got a little wild and long, so I wanted to clarify some things here, because I am not always the best at wording during discussions.
Firstly: If the manuscript you want to query is long, you don’t have to go into a panic!
There are lots of agents who are okay with manuscripts in the 110k-130k range, and still many who will take higher counts, (even, in one case, up to 300k words).
Having a bit of extra (or fewer) words also won’t make an agent who is reading and loving your book reject it! As long as the story itself is good and it’s near the range they like, and they’re intrigued enough to start reading it, that little bit on the end won’t change anything.
The point of this discussion on word count is twofold:
1. Always evaluate why your story is the length it is and make sure it should in fact be that length. (This holds true for all books, regardless of word count!) If you have bulk there that isn’t needed, then cut it. If you have skimpy patches, add to them. Make your book be the length it must to properly tell the story you want to tell.
2. Know that if your book falls outside the most commonly desired range for your genre, some agents and editors won’t want it. That’s okay. It’s okay to choose to query something that only certain people will be interested in. But in order to feel confident in your book and push through those rejections, it’s good to know it upfront and decide that your book is worth that extra effort of hunting down the specific people who might love it.
Sometimes the result of #1 is that you realize your long book is, in fact, needlessly long or too short. Sometimes the result of #2 is that you realize you want to query your more typical length debut project first. Sometimes the result of both is that you’re happy with what you have and are going to push onward.
There’s also another component here that we absolutely can’t ignore:
Word count isn’t all that makes a book marketable.
There are many attributes which tie into marketability. A book that hits the market perfectly, is well-written, has a unique hook but good comps, and comes with a fantastic query can easily have an extremely high (or low) word count because in all other ways it’s perfectly sellable. A book with few of those features will be hard to get an agent for even at the world’s most traditional debut word count.
As I’m so fond of repeating: Querying is like a card game. The more you stray from what agents are looking for, the more you’re stacking the cards against yourself. You might still win. But it gets harder and harder will every less-than-marketable aspect you include. Querying is already ridiculously hard, and sometimes it’s nice to make sure that we have a good deck starting out. Other times, those cards you choose to stack against yourself are worth it to you.
That’s all I have to say, but I did want to share the fantastic graph Cinnia made based on the results of @angelicbadass’s twitter call for data on debut word counts.
While this is a very small study with no categories to account for exact SFF genre, based on it, we get an average word count of about 101k for debuts, with a mean of about 96k. There is variation, but most sit between 80k and 115k.
What does that mean for you? Each person has to decide that for themselves, in regards to each book they attempt to query. There’s no single right answer, only what’s right for you and your book at the this point in time.
I wish you all the very best of luck with all your manuscripts, long, short, and everything in between. If you believed in your book when you set out to query, then keep striving. And keep writing. The only thing that will prevent you from getting an agent is is if you choose not to querying your next book.
