Came to a realization a week ago. As I did more research on soliciting literary agents and their general requirements, I realized that there is no possible way I could sell my first book in its current format.
Why? Its got too many damn words!
Its one of the reasons why I got no bites the first time I sent out queries to agents a few years back. So now I’ll have to go back and do some surgery. In its current format, its TWO TIMES the word count of what is acceptable for a full length novel manuscript.
What literary agents want is something between 70,000 and 110,000 words from rookie authors, which equates to between 250 to under 400 pages when fully published. Obviously, if you’re Stephen King, Tom Clancy or J.K. Rowling, you can write over 200,000 in word count and no one will so much as bat an eyelash when they had over a nice fat advance. Clearly I’m none of these three authors.
So the new plan is this. I’m still in the middle of taking a first editing pass at my second Star Brigade novel manuscript. So far, I’ve chopped off 26 pages and over 15,000 words. And I’m about a third of the way through the book. I’m hoping to ultimately drop about 50 more pages and about 45,000 more words at least.
After that, I’ll dive back into the first book all the way. I’m hoping to chop off a good 60 pages and hopefully 50,000 words before I have an editor friend doe some more surgery. In hindsight, this is a good thing. There are some areas of my first novel which I would like to tweak. Organization names, plot points and such. My hope? That I can get the first manuscript down to about 115k or 125k. Let’s pray for that to do the trick. But regardless I’ll still send my query letter off for a final pass just so its already done and ready by the time my manuscript is.
We’ll see, and I’ll keep you updated.
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