The Long and the Longer Of It
Understanding the Unkindest Cuts
“I mean, it’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost? Ten dollars?”
—Lucille Bluth
I know I recently wrote a whole article on why we should move away from the automatic agreement with the sentiment “less is more.” I stand by that article. I stand by everything I write. Except my manuscript from college that Maria found in a drawer and read before I was able to request she burn it. Anyway I’m faking my death and moving to New Zealand and starting again with a new identity, there’s no other way forward. I stand by everything else I’ve written. Actually, standby. I did just unearth a 1990s-era notebook of mine and I haven’t quite gathered the fortitude to look in it. It has a purple crushed-velvet cover, so you know whatever’s in there must be quite dramatic.
Today’s article is on manuscript length, and the reasons why we writers are so often asked to curtail it, something I hear about from pretty much every corner of my social and professional circles all the time. Several months ago, I think around the holidays, I was chatting virtually with a friend when I mentioned that I was in the process of editing down a future Shelf Life article since it had run overlength. My friend wanted to know, since I publish Shelf Life myself, why would I ever have to edit myself for length? Couldn’t I just write as much as I want? Who has the authority to tell me I can’t? Is it to sell merch?
It is definitely not to sell merch. I’m not even sure how those things are related, to be honest. Matt, I’ve been scratching my head for like six months.
My friend writes research articles for academic journals sometimes as part of his job, so I’m not surprised he wondered about this. I work on journals in my civilian life, my non-Shelf Life life, and I am all too familiar with the requests from authors to please ease up on the word count limit a bit. Let them have just a tiny bit more to say in the abstract, or a few extra references over the hard limit, or a couple hundred more words for the methods section. I mean, it doesn’t even push the article over to a new page.
What could it possibly cost?
I also hear a lot of discourse in the writers’ groups that I participate in about manuscript-length recommendations for different types of fiction and why writers ought not be held to those recommendations. Writers are artists. You can’t tell artists how to make their art. Both of those statements are true. Also true: Many if not most artists live and die without ever selling a piece of their art for money.
For today’s Shelf Life I want to cover a handful of related topics in rapid succession, to wit:
Industry standard word counts for various types of fiction and how those translate to page counts;
The logic behind those industry word counts and how they are decided;
Why fighting for your druthers to keep every word of that debut novels is not in your best interest; and
The psychology of what, how, and why people choose what they read.
A lot of different people will give a lot of different “industry standard” word counts but the truth is, each individual agent and acquiring editor knows what is just too long for them to consider and that information isn’t usually available for hopeful authors. There’s a lot of available guidance all around the internet about the magic numbers but I urge you to look for the most recent information you can find because editorial preferences in the aggregate change all the time.
A clarification: There are presses out there, and not a small number of them, that exist to publish work they feel is meritorious and important. These presses are likely to be less concerned with the commercial salability of a manuscript. I mean, they still want to sell units. But their methodology may be to try and hit the bestseller list and encourage sales via the award circuit and not by appealing to the taste of the general reading public, whatever that is at the moment (vampires probably).
But most of the publishers we think of when we think of getting a big book deal are those big 5—the companies that put out the hardcover bestsellers with the excellent marketing and a major motion picture in the works. If you want to sell to one of them, you’ll need an agent. Agents are picky, because they don’t get paid unless you get paid. A super fast way to make sure the agent you’re pitching to doesn’t even consider your query is if you’re completely out of range for the type of manuscript you’ve written.
As a production editor, I will be the first to tell you that
Your manuscript’s word count does not ultimately determine your book’s page count; and
Your book’s page count does not ultimately determine its spine bulk.
That is to say, a 50,000-word manuscript could come out more pages than a 70,000-word manuscript, and a 352-page book could come out skinnier (less spine bulk) than a 256-pager. Specs are everything. Please don’t get at me for making the following broad generalization but I think it’s important to help readers visualize so we’re going to go with this very, very general rule of thumb just as a visual aid: A 50,000-word manuscript is likely to turn out about a 200-page book and a 100,000-word manuscript is likely to turn out about a 400-page book.
Ugh, I feel slimy just saying that because I know how completely malleable page counts can be. But here’s why it matters:
Most readers
Will not take a chance
On an author they don’t know
Writing a standalone or the first installment of a series
If the book is bigger than its competitors.
By bigger I am mostly talking about spine bulk, but keeping in mind that spine bulk may only be manipulated so far. If a reader in the store flips the book open and sees text crammed on the page like the New York Times when they were expecting to see airy leading and open margins based on other books like yours that they’ve seen before, they are going to put it right down, even if the spine doesn’t intimidate them.
Let’s say I like ice cream (I do). Let’s say my grocery store starts carrying a new brand of ice cream. Totally new brand. I’ve never heard of it before. There are some reviews out, which I might or might not have seen before I went to the grocery store. If I’m shopping online I’m more likely to read those reviews, but I’m also more likely to critically examine product specs before I buy since I’m in the comfort of my own home and not standing with my face in the freezer case.
The new ice cream brand only comes in gallon buckets. If I see a gallon-size bucket of something I already know I like—like chocolate Häagen-Dazs—then I’d be happy to buy a gallon of it. Even if Häagen-Dazs put out a new and unconventional flavor, I know this brand has never led me astray before and I might be willing to buy a gallon if that’s the only available size.
But this is new ice cream is totally unknown. I have no idea if I’ll like it. Do I want to invest in a gallon of ice cream if I don’t even know if it’s good? Other people might tell me it’s good but that still doesn’t mean I will like it. I don’t want to be in the position of deciding between forcing myself to finish something I don’t like or wasting my money, that’s the worst. I don’t want to be stuck with ninety-nine hundredths of a gallon of Halo Top in my freezer too nasty to even feed to the garbage disposal.
Why would I ever do that when I can just get something I already know I like? Or try something new that comes in a pint size so I don’t invest so much trying it out?
I don’t have hard data to give you on this because this is information I’ve learned from a decade of pub committees and transmittal meetings and hard conference calls with authors about cutting text and many, many requests to find creative ways to make books bigger or smaller but, you know, without making it look like you creatively made it bigger or smaller. Here’s the thing: When researches ask people how they choose their books, they respond that the most important decision is genre or category, followed by author, followed by reviews. (This info comes from the very cool Panorama Project.) But when it comes to what marketing professionals in the book business know about the way people decide to buy books, they know that the size of the book influences that decision more than consumers consciously realize.
Many, many people have suggested to me that the reason book publishers, and academic journal publishers, and outlets that purchase short fiction, have such strict expectations that word counts not be exceeded, it’s because we don’t want to spend more money on producing and printing a larger book or journal, or we don’t want to pay for more words (for those outlets that pay per word). This is not true.
Publishers don’t want to take a risk on longer books—especially from debut authors—because consumers do not want longer books, especially from debut authors.
If readers wanted 800-page books, publishers would be signing 800-page books left and right. I promise. Everyone can point to a wildly popular fat-bottomed book like Order of the Phoenix or A Storm of Swords but those aren’t equivalent examples. Those are later installments to series that were already wildly popular. You know how many words were in the first Harry Potter installment? Like 75,000. What about A Game of Thrones, though, that was around 300,000 words and it was the first in a series? GRRM had already been steadily selling manuscripts for twenty years before he sold A Game of Thrones. His first published novel was a fraction of that size.
The reason publishers don’t usually to sign, and agents don’t usually rep, manuscripts from new authors that are out of bounds in terms of length, is because they know they can’t reasonably sell these.
Now, I want to talk a little bit about what happens when you do the thing we all think we can do, which is convince a publisher to publish our book in spite of its length, because it’s just so good that readers will make an exception in our case and buy it anyway.
Sometimes they do. Sometimes books break the mold and someone signs a giant tome from a debut author, like The Secret History or The Historian and it becomes a success and launches a career. What if someone had made Donna Tartt cut out half of her text? Would we still have the scene where the unmemorable narrator stares out his dorm room window and admires a birch tree in the moonlight? Would we have had all that disordered hair? Probably not.
Commercial publishers take chances all the time. They take risks. Their model succeeds by signing as many prospects as they can each year, knowing that many of these will fail, but that a few will go on to be bestsellers and fund all of next year’s prospects so they can do it again. Publishers don’t know which books will fail—or they wouldn’t sign them—but they know that many of the books they sign will fail in spite of all the development, production, design, and marketing work that goes into them.
Why not take a chance on your book failing, then? The publisher watches books fail all the time and the publisher stays in business, but if your book fails—your debut, that is—you don’t stay in business. If you think getting a contract on your debut is hard, wait till you try to sell your second title after the first one doesn’t earn out.
A debut that flops is often career death for a nascent author. (Note: Not every book that fails to earn out its advance is a flop, but it’s still not great for this to happen). If your book doesn’t earn out—or worse, doesn’t turn a profit for the publisher—they’re unlikely to sign another book from you. This is a risk even for an established author—I believe one of Mira Grant’s series is in limbo right now, the next installment languishing as the previous didn’t make it into the black—but how much riskier for a first-timer without a history of prior success. You’ll have an uphill battle ahead of you for a second shot at trad publishing, if that shot ever comes.
I’ll finish with some wisdom from the nonfiction side of things, where I have spent most of my W2 hours in publishing. As in every format and genre, we were always, always inundated with manuscripts coming in overlength, sometimes by 20 or 30 percent more words than what the author promised in their proposal. Authors, loathe to cut text, almost universally saw a longer text as a bonus and not a detriment: I’m giving you more. Who wouldn’t want more? (Well, the purchasers for one, and the end users for two, and us for three.)
The question back to them is posed eternal: What does your book contain that its competitors do not and why does it contain that? Quantify the more for us so we can figure out what we’re working with and whether we even want to work with it. In nonfiction the more might be—
Subject areas are covered that my competitors don’t cover.
I include and analyze more data than my competitors.
I included case studies in each chapter and my competitors didn’t.
Cool, now we can try to figure out if that’s actually of value to the consumer or not. But, as often as not, careful review by a developmental editor with an utterly comprehensive knowledge of the competition would turn up this uncomfortable chestnut:
This author just uses more words—maybe a lot more words—to say the same thing their competition does.
Anyway, give it some thought. If you know that science fiction novels usually run somewhere around 80,000 to 120,000 words and you’ve written 250,000—why? What do you have that your competitors don’t have? What is it about your story that takes more than twice as many words to tell as other stories of this type?
Be exacting when you do this editorial calculus. People say publishers don’t want to take a risk on longer manuscripts because publishers are cheap and more words cost them more money. But they know they lose money on most of their titles. Yes, it costs them money when a book fails but it only costs them money. If it’s your book that fails, it will cost you a lot more.
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