Word counter books
Many good books break at least a few of the “rules.” Almost every great book does. If your novel is a taut 70k, adding 10k of fluff to hit the “required” 80k length you read about online you’re likely to make the book worse and thus harder to sell.Īrt is not math. Personally, I think MFA programs should all include panels or classes on the business side of being a writer from querying agents to filing freelance tax returns.īut! It can be artistically crushing to worry about following every publishing imperative you’ve ever heard, including the idea there is a “right” word count. But if you are hoping to sell your book to publishers and have it appear in bookstores, knowing the market is useful. If you only want to write for yourself, obviously do whatever you want. To learn as much as you can about (ugh) “the market” and where your work can fit. On the other hand, I do think it’s important to understand the business side of the equation.
On the one hand, authors are artists and should worry first and foremost about creating the best art they can, in whatever shape it needs to take. But this topic does hit the twin points of this newsletter-fiction craft and publishing demystification-so it feels like a good topic for a (hopefully measured) take. It was proof that self-publishing is the only way to go, or proof that editors are crushing art, or proof that novels suck these days because authors needlessly pad out word count, etc.Īnyway, I don’t want to reproduce the initial tweets here because the whole discourse entered pile-on territory. An editor at a commercial-minded independent press tweeted that it broke their heart to see brilliant manuscripts in the 50k to 70k range because adult fiction books had to be 80k-120k and this-in the way of The Discourse-produced some informative tweets but also spiraled quickly into people angrily tweeting about their pet issues. For most of the morning, Twitter has been fighting about one of the seemingly dullest things: book word counts.