Word Counts
Posted in writing on June 11th, 2009 by andrew mackay – 3 Comments I frequently struggle with what my goal for my first novel should be in terms of word count. I know that I need to focus on just telling a story and let the word count be what it is. I keep on picking up on a prevailing “If it’s longer than… it’s too long” attitude. As though to prove my point and make me think about it more, there’s this fascinating little article at Editorial Assistant about word count. He says:
I think you’ll find in a survey of successful literary debut novels, the average page count is between 250 and 400. Often, authors get really famous for longer opuses–but those aren’t their debuts. Those are their second or third books.
There are practical reasons for this rule! It’s not (entirely) that editors are close-minded pigs. The reason is 100,000 words casts off at about 480 typeset pages. That would make your book…well, a lot of pages–astronomically expensive to produce.
Now, he grants in the comments the you can get away with perhaps a little more if you’re writing genre fiction. But, the prevailing wisdom certainly seems to be that somewhere between 65,000 words on the low side and 90,000 words on the high side is ideal for a debut novel.
In a single day, I can go from being convinced that I’ll never hit 65k to being terrified that I’ll never keep it under 100k.
I guess I’ll just finish it and then edit it as necessary. Novel idea. Hehe… get it? Novel? Heh.
