Indie Authors and Agents

[zoewinters]

Z, please forgive my ignorance here...in your experience, what length/words do traditional publishers want?

Thanks,

Ed

Ed,

It really depends on the publisher and the line. I write romance and there are category romances via Harlequin that have fairly short word length requirements, but I don't write category romances. What I write, most publishers want around 350 pages or so, so around 90,000 words, give or take. But every publisher and line is different and it's been a long time since I've bothered to look into publisher requirements of any stripe. It just seems that most popular commercial fiction tends to fall around that length and I don't do well at that length. I'm always padding it, trying to make it longer, and wondering why I can't write that long.

[zoewinters]

From agentquery.com:

Word Count for first time novelist:
Adult fiction: 80,000-100,000 words.
Young Adult fiction: 40,000-60,000 words
Erotica novellas/short story collections: 40,000-60,000 words
Cozy mysteries only: 50,000-70,000 words
Most romance novels: 50,000-70,000 words
Short Story Collections: 40,000-75,000 words
Historical Fiction: 80,000-140,000 words
Adult Fantasy: 90,000-140,000 words

Personally, I like writing in the 40K-80K range

Yay, Jess! I'm glad my number was in the right range! I was about 90% sure it was, but it's been a long time since I've looked into that sort of thing. It's all just trivia now.

Except the romance novel length they're talking seems to me to be more for category romance and specific lines that are shorter, particularly from Harlequin. I know most of the romance I read is much longer than that, not because I really like long fiction, but because the stuff I like comes in longer book lengths.

[Ed_ODell]

Jess, Zoe:

Thanks for the info. While I've seen numbers in the past, I've never given them any weight...more like "suggestions." I may have to add two or three chapters to get my count up to 75,000 or so.

Weird...one moment I'm trying everything I can to "tighten it up," removing any fluff, and now...well...thanks a lot!!!        

[jonfmerz]

Ed, if you do aspire to a traditional publishing deal, you'll need to have a manuscript in the 82,000-85,000 range (with a couple grand leeway in either direction).  The average printed mass market paperback book is between 320-350 pages (depending on whether you're dialogue-heavy or exposition-heavy).  Publishers use a certain formula to determine page length, printing costs to do books of this range, and other factors, which has a direct result in the word count they're looking for. 

Best of luck!

[jesscscott]

Yeah, I find writing according to word counts to be quite counter-productive. You go round in circles trying to create a manuscript to appease agents and publishers (and their overhead costs), at the expense of the story, the characters, and the readers. If ~80K is the industry standard, then that's the standard, though personally, I'd rather read (and/or produce) 3 grand pages than 300 pages of garbage.

Incidentally, here's the song playing on my MP3 right now!:

April 13 2010 11.10AM
[music playing: Christina Aguilera - Can't Hold Us Down - (featuring Lil' Kim)]

"You must talk so big, to make up for smaller things..."

[Christopher Meeks]

I'm in line with Maria and Jon in that with the publishing world in flux, indie and traditional represent two different things and can coexist with the same author. As I was reminded at the recent AWP creative writing conference in Denver, the big publishing companies are owned by conglomerates and hedge funds, and the bottom line is everything, with Bookscan counting books sold. The big publishers are not out to groom writers, and if the first three books of a new author flop, they don't tell themselves, "Hang in there and we'll have a Hemingway." For big publishers, genre fiction does particularly well. Literary fiction, less so.

Thus, authors who write well but don't have a huge following are finding that indie publishing can be a viable option. If you have a manuscript worthy of a big audience, particularly if you have a romance, thriller, or mystery, then getting an agent may be an obvious pursuit. Writing a great query letter and sending a fabulous sample works. It worked for me. I like my New York agent a lot. Before him, I knew my collections of literary short fiction were not about big numbers, so I went the indie route and have been quite happy, winning awards and getting even some big reviews. It hasn't made me want to leave my agent. Rather, I'm writing my first mystery. It should be something he can sell.

At the AWP Conference, author Michael Chabon, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for Kavalier & Clay, gave the keynote address, and he spoke at length about have a broader definition of genre fiction. To read more about his speech, go here: http://www.redroom.com/blog/christopher-meeks/for-the-benjamins-part-two-awp