Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog
Follow word count guidelines to keep from snoozifying your reader.
A constant complaint I hear from agents, editors, writing teachers, and reviewers is that they see too many manuscripts with inappropriate word counts.
If you’re getting a lot of form rejections or simply silence from agents, reviewers and editors, this may be why.
Word count guidelines have been trending down in the last decade. Most editors won’t look at a debut manuscript longer than 100K words—a little longer if it’s fantasy or a non-romance historical. They were not so rigid ten years ago.
Now publishers—and many readers—won’t take a chance on any long book by an unproven author.
While readers will happily plunk down the big bux for an 819-page book by George R. R. Martin, they’ll turn up their noses at a book that long—even if it only costs 99c—if it’s written by Who R. You.
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