After finishing this last manuscript, I wondered how bad it was that I’d gone over 130k on the word count (having since trimmed down this number during revisions). I know fantasy and science fiction tend to be a little more lenient towards the “fat” book sitting on the shelf. I bet there’s even a subgenre of readers who despise the skinny books, preferring to read by the pound rather than the page count. But does it harm your chances of getting an agent to read your work, much less an editor if you send them a manuscript heavy enough to double as a murder weapon?
Yes and No. (Hooray for circumstantial answers.)The reality is, there are always exceptions to any hard rule publishing tries to impose on manuscript standards. There will always be some enormous bestseller that someone can point to as justification for their 350k novel of what they had for breakfast. And yes, if the writing is that amazing, editors and agents may give a huge book a chance.
There are some general limits, however, depending on your genre and what form of story you are writing. Obviously, 50,000 words a short story does not make. Nor is 5,000 a novel. Colleen Lindsay, literary agent at FinePrint, posted her views on wordcount here and included a nifty layout of various genres and acceptable wordcounts. Here’s a cut from what she put up:
YA fiction = Can be anywhere from about 50k to 80k; sometimes – but rarely – goes above 90k
urban fantasy / paranormal romance = Usually around the 80k to 90k mark.
mysteries and crime fiction = While cozies tend to be shorter than the average (somewhere around the 60k to 70k mark), most books that fall into this category fall right around the 80k to 100k mark
mainstream fiction = Depending upon the kind of fiction, this can vary: chick lit runs anywhere from 60k word to 80k words; literary fiction can run as high as 120k but lately there’s been a trend toward more spare and elegant shorter literary novels; thrillers also run in somewhere around the 90k to 100k mark; historical fiction can run as high as 140k words or more (and again, these are just rough guides – there are always exceptions). And anything under 50k is usually considered a novella, which isn’t something agents or editors ever want to see unless the editor has commissioned a short story collection.
science fiction and fantasy = Here’s where most writers seem to have problems: most editors I’ve spoken to recently at major SF/F houses want books that fall into the higher end of the adult fiction you see above; a few of them told me that 100k words is the ideal manuscript size for good space opera or fantasy; for a truly spectacular epic fantasy, they’ll consider 120k /130k.
So whereabouts into the word count stratosphere have your novels been launched? Are they still soaring high, until you’re losing sight of where they’ll land? Or have you installed a glass ceiling for them to bump up against?
I see that smile.