If you’re not a writer and don’t have any interest in writing, this post probably won’t seem particularly interesting. I haven’t discussed it with other writers, so I don’t know if I’m peculiar or not when it comes to my interest/concern regarding wordcount. For the uninitiated, wordcount may seem completely irrelevant, but for those pursuing publication (at least via the traditional route), it makes a difference.

I got my first impression of the necessary wordcount for different classes of stories from the SFWA’s Nebula guidelines (http://www.sfwa.org/nebula-awards/rules/), which pegs a novel at 40K or more. However, when I actually started making my first attempts to submit my work, I found that publishers were generally looking more in the range for 75-100K. Why the difference? It’s mostly a matter of bang for your buck. If the novel is too short, it’s not as cost-effective to print, I believe. Now, the standards are different depending on genre and subclass. For instance, that 75-100K is the ballpark for an adult novel. If you write a children’s book or a YA novel, the desired wordcount would be lower.

Before we go further, I’d like you to take a quick look at this list of wordcounts for some well-known door-stoppers (http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/node/1869). With that in mind, would you believe that my early draft of KoG1 was only around 16K? It’s true. I actually had to bundle the entire trilogy together to get to 89K when I was doing submissions in ’03. The rejection was truly a blessing as I’ve since greatly reworked the books and they’re much better for it. Particularly starting out, I had a very sparse style of writing and it’s still rather true today. It’s not that I’m opposed to descriptive narrative, but I do generally veer toward conservation of detail. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, I’ll leave that to the reader’s judgment.

For some comparison, let’s take a look at the wordcounts of the novels I’ve completed thus far, rounded to the nearest thousand.

Knight of Gladius, Volume I – 62K
Knight of Gladius, Volume II – 74K
Knight of Gladius, Volume III – 154K
The Three Warriors – 49K
The Trident War Chronicles, Volume I – 87K
Ticonderoga, Volume I – 100K
Ticonderoga, Volume II – 104K
Ticonderoga, Volume III – 71K

Going the conventional route, getting KoG1 published as it is would be a challenge and T3W would almost be a guaranteed no-go unless I built enough rep to get a pass on it. Personally, I’m a strong believer that a story should be no longer or no shorter than it needs to be and because the current model doesn’t have to account for publishers’ requirements, it’s fine. If I would say anything on the subject to aspiring writers, I’d say not to worry about wordcount too much. Get the story where it needs to be and if you have to wrestle with your editor later, you can deal with it then.

Anyway, that should do it for now. If you found this interesting, great. If not, well, I don’t think you have to worry about a sequel.

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