Author Updates: Guest post with A. J. Vrana on Cutting Words & Marlena Frank on TV
A. J. Vrana, author of THE HOLLOW GODS joins us with a guest post geared toward helping fellow writers tackle the daunting task of cutting words from a story or a manuscript. Utilize this understanding, and the tips and tricks laid out below to refine the language in any writing project!
There is no shortage of jokes about writers. Whether you are a hobbyist or a professional, you’re bound to encounter a quip or two about creative types and their stubborn dedication to their artistic vision. Creative people are sometimes incorrectly stereotyped as being spacey, unmoored, and impractical, much to my personal chagrin. Of course, if that were true, none of us would have succeeded in making a living with our creative work, least of all in a business that is primarily concerned with one thing: making money.
There is no separating creative writing from the publishing industry if, well, you want to be published. While there are many talented, visionary writers out there, navigating the business side of publishing can prove frustrating and alienating for many people. However, if we want our work read, we need to come to terms with the fact that publishing is a business, and businesses will always be concerned with how to maximize their profits. One of the ways they do this is by becoming intimately acquainted with the market. For a book to be publishable, it needs to have commercial potential. It doesn’t matter how breath-taking, eloquent, or poetic your writing is; if it isn’t something a publisher feels they can sell to a market they themselves have carved out through a long history of curated publication and advertisement, there is little hope the manuscript will be acquired by an agent or an editor.
One of the often understated facets of marketability is word count. See, when I say, “markets that have been carved out through a history of curated publication,” I’m talking about genre conventions that have slowly but surely become cemented in readers’ understanding of literature, and subsequently inform their expectations. Word count is one of the many markers of how well a work fits within its intended genre. It has implications not only for a publisher’s production costs and returns, but for how the market will actually receive the work.
So, what is an acceptable word count for your next best seller? Well, it depends on the genre. Here are some general figures for popular genres; these can be easily found on the interwebs:
• Mainstream Romance: 70,000–100,000 words
• Subgenre Romance: 40,000–100,000 words
• Science Fiction / Fantasy: 90,000–120,000
• Historical Fiction: 80,000–100,000
• Thrillers / Horror / Mysteries / Crime: 70,000–90,000 words
• Young Adult: 50,000–80,000
• Middle Grade: 25,000–40,000 words
With the exception of kidlit and SFF, you’ll notice immediately that the upper end of the word count bracket for most genres is 100k. However, I would argue that if you’re a debut author, your SFF should also be around or under 100k. Once you go over thismark, the work becomes an increasingly difficult sell for both agents and publishers.