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Blogs by Jonathan Jones
Word-count Rationing 4/21/2016 5:57:19 AM
An upfront account of why I decided to self-publish my work, and a peek inside what passes for rational decision making in a fiction writer.
I’d like to talk a little about one of the reasons I chose to self publish my work - namely, publishing houses’ word count restrictions. What no-one tells you when you start out as an aspiring novelist, is that when you are an unpublished and untested author, publishers will not even consider your manuscript if it is over a specific length.
I’m not going to get too heavy handed in my criticism of publisher’s policies. There are very concrete reasons for traditional publishers not taking a commercial risk on novelists until they have proven they can sell books. Lengthier tomes cost more to produce and ship and store. They take up more room on bookstore shelves, reducing the amount of visible choices presented to discerning customers.
But the word count restrictions created by these practical problems, makes things difficult for the first-time novelist, especially if she or he is writing in certain genres. Fantasy in particularly is well-known for its chunky, satisfying, difficult-to-lift epics. If you are submitting your first novel for publication and it’s in the Fantasy genre, 115,000 words is considered the maximum recommended length, assuming you don’t want your MS to end up in the slush pile.
As I said, no one tells you these things. I didn’t discover this unfortunate fact until my genre-busting vampire novel was ten years in the making and more than double the recommended word count for a first novel in most of the genres it might fit into. Far too late to change course. Reducing the length would mean either brutally hacking it back, like some diseased tree, or chopping it in two (leaving many plot threads unresolved, character arcs dangling and themes trailing away, disconnected, into some abstract limbo created by the frustrations of stifled creative souls).
The point is, I’m not just a starving artist, I’m a principled starving artist (meaning, one who is more determined to starve than most). Releasing a butchered version of my precious novel was never an option. It was this length for a reason, because I felt that this was the correct length for the story I was telling. I’d already edited quite ruthlessly for redundant words and sentences, and I’m quite confident that everything (okay, almost everything (okay, most of it)) in the book is there for a purpose. The story is set in a fictional world, it has an epic scale, it has a large cast of characters, and I’ve tried to make it as heavy on action, horror and suspense as it is on poignancy, psychological drama and moral dilemmas. All of these things take space, they take words, in order to be effectively conveyed. If you are writing a large-scale story in this kind of genre, a huge portion of your word count automatically has to go towards description and exposition. A certain amount of action and adventure is usually expected as well. If you also want things like a complex plot, character development, and resonating themes, you usually need to push the limits of those 115,000 words, at least a little.
I know many great genre novels have been written that have stuck to a shorter word count and managed to be compelling, intriguing and moving as well as simply telling a story - but I’m sure that they are the exception. Genre fiction presents certain added challenges. If I was starting out writing my novel now, I may have restrained myself more, deliberately written a more intimate, small-scale story. But that book would have been very different to the one I’ve created, raised and nurtured until it was ready to go out into the world. This is the book I wanted to create, dammit, and it’s the one I want people to read. It’s the one I want you, patient blog-browser, to read.
