How many words should your book have?
There are distinct genre totals. Take for example the Young Adult market. They tend to be 50,000 to 65,000.
Any more than that they won’t read. Got a book that’s 95,000 words in the YA genre?
You need to trim a third of the book out.
It’s like Sci-fi trying to claim that since Dune was around 190,000 words it’s permissable.
Well, what happened with Frank Herbert is he probably told his editor, “show me what part of the book I can cut out.”
He’d written the book so well there was no way to cut anything.
Bottom line is, you must conform to the word count expectations of your genre.
You just wrote 50,000 words. If you’re in the Sci-fi market, you’re about 30,000 words shy of where you need to be.
30,000 to 50,000.
most fiction intended for adult readers aims for around 80,000 to 89,000 words. Sci Fi and Fantasy, the expectations is usually longer. For instance, My Star Trek novel is… about 20,000 words shy of publishable. I’ve literally got to get the count to around 75,000 words for Simon & Schuster to consider it.
So, let’s look. your book needs to conform to:
Act 1 – 25% of the word count
Act 2 – 50% of the word count
Act 3 – 25% of the word count.
this is where you use a spread sheet to check your word counts. Just looking at “Blazing Glory” yields in scenes that Act 1 is right, Act 2 is short and act 3 a little long. I haven’t checked by word count yet, but it seemed at the right percentages to me. As I go through a novel, my scenes tend to get shorter and shorter. This is pacing, and we’ll talk about that later.
put your word counts into Libreoffice Calc or Microsoft Excel. You should have 7 chapters for act 1, 14 for act 2 and 7 for act 3. Check your word counts.
Now we have to start expanding.
What promises did you make in Act 1 that haven’t been answered?
fix that first.
Character arc. I have a stumbling area in my first act- Abigail falls for Josiah almost immediately. Well, that’s how real life happens. In fiction, readers get a little antsy about it. They want to know WHY Abigail is falling for Josiah. Is it his looks. his personality, his obsession with redeeming his violent life? So part of Act 1 is that I have to expand on this.
Josiah has a character arc that goes from emotional pain over his ability as the fastest gun in the southwest. He’s killed so many people he filled a cemetery in El Paso all by himself. He is reluctant to shoot again. I think I made the hesitation last far too long, so I have to edit this down.
Frank London. I need to expand on this a lot more. He’s an interesting character. He just seems like a weasel of a character, sly, grasping, lazy and a drnkard. As the book goes along, he becomes more and more chilling as you get to know him.
Dabney Wharton – intimidating and evil. Raspy voice. I have the reader undecided about Wharton’s intentions with Frank. And I need to keep it that way. Can’t say any more without giving it away. Will Dabney betray Frank or not? Will Frank betray Dabney Wharton or not?
Horace. I wrote him nicely. very happy how he turned out. But at the end, I included something that had no promises earlier. now I have to do back and add those!
Drama. Do I have enough drama in the scenes? Is the ending inevitable?
is the ending big enough? I gave a hint of something all through the book that I included – by accident – in the ending scene. Literally, I wrote myself into the corner and said… “Aha!”
your ending must show no way out for the protagonist. The thing they don’t want to do is the thigng they must do.
Do you know who Josiah is from the first paragraph in the book?
A good quote to think of is, the first chapter sells the book. The last chapter sells the next book.
And the first 30 pages have to convince the reader they must read page 31, or you’re sunk.
December we fix this!
