I'm Worried About Your Debut Fantasy Novel
Picture this: You’re in your favorite bookstore. You’re sipping coffee and looking for a new fantasy book to add to your collection.
Are you going to:
A) spend $18 on a hardcover version of A Court of Thorns and Roses (a book you’ve heard of with over 100,000 reviews), or
B) spend more than that on a really long paperback from an author you’ve never heard of whose book has less than 100 reviews?
Most people are going to say A, right?
That hypothetical is the reality that self-publishing authors face—and I think it’s especially an issue for fantasy authors and debut authors.
When we talk about high (or epic) fantasy, the first thing we think about is the Lord of the Rings trilogy. (Maybe that’s just me, I’m a super nerd. Still.) There’s no denying that it set a standard and it’s the thing a lot of young fantasy authors aspire to create.
But Tolkien published The Hobbit first. Its success caused the publishers to request a sequel, and the rest is history.
That context is important. Tolkien didn’t come out swinging with long books; The Hobbit is less than 100,000 words long.
And even though The Hobbit was so successful, his publishers didn’t let him do whatever he wanted with LOTR. He originally wanted to publish them as one book. 😶
That would be like reading Carrie and the sequel being IT.
I think the publishers made the right call. There would still be fans of the books, of course, but I know if I saw a massive book like that as the follow-up to a story that already had a decent enough ending, I wouldn’t bother picking it up.
Since then, fantasy series have only gotten longer.
Page count varies for different editions, but for reference, the LOTR trilogy is only a little over 1,000 pages long—and some of those pages are the appendices.
If you add The Hobbit to that page count, it’s maybe 1,500 pages (give or take a few).
The Harry Potter series is more than 6,000 pages long.
A Game of Thrones box set has almost 6,000 pages in it. From the word count, a single book in the series is almost as long as Tolkien’s entire trilogy!
The Throne of Glass series is over 5,000 pages long.
Obviously, there’s an expectation for long books in the epic fantasy genre.
And you don’t want to fall short of someone’s expectations!
But.
When you don’t already have some success under your belt, it will be a struggle to find readers (or agents and publishers) who are willing to take a chance on your book.
You don’t just have to take my word for it.
As I was looking up some stats for this post, I found an old blog tour post written by SJM herself about how much work it took her to finally publish TOG. Her original manuscript was around 240,000 words long!
She got feedback that led her to trimming almost 100,000 off the book, which was good enough for her agent—but not her eventual publisher. By the end of a grueling revision process, TOG is only a little more than 100,000 words total.
Whether you’re a publishing house or a self-publishing author, if this is something you want to make a profit on, you need to think about the marketability of a book. The cover and the blurb is part of that, but so are things like the price tag and how easy it is for a reader to pick it up on a whim.
If you want writing to be the thing that lets you quit your day job, you have to make business decisions as well as creative ones.
There’s nothing stopping you from creating just for yourself and not worrying about monetary gain, of course!
But if you want any of the success we measure with numbers, your book’s marketability can’t be an afterthought.
Neither can the behind-the-scenes costs.
All of those pages need to be edited.
They all need to be formatted.
They should be proofread.
If your book is almost 200,000 words long, that’s going to cost you a lot of money.
And if you’re a debut author, publishers will not accept your book. They can’t guarantee a return on their investment.
You need to consider this if you’re going to self-publish, too.
If you’re the one spending so much money to publish such a long book, you want to at least make some of it back. Naturally, this will lead you to charge more for your book.
But how many readers are willing to invest $30+ and all of the time it would take to read a 600-page book by someone they’ve never heard of before?
Not many.
I believe there will still be some. Readers like adventures—why not take a chance on a new author? And long books have a place on my shelf, something that’s true for many other readers.
Just last week I found an indie author whose books I can’t wait to get my hands on even though the shortest one is 500 pages long. (Her paperbacks and e-book prices are average, though. And the new special edition…..I’d pay a lot of money for that book. 🥰🥰🥰)
If publishing a really long book is what you really want to do, I’m not going to stand in your way.
But I’m going to worry about you.
If you’re concerned too…well, now what?
What should you do with an extra long manuscript—especially as a debut author?
(What counts as an extra long manuscript will depend on what genre you’re writing, but a quick Google will tell you what the average manuscript length for your genre is.)
First things first, get some outside opinions on your story! (You should be doing this no matter how long your manuscript is.)
These don’t have to come from professional editors, just some people whose opinions you trust (ideally fellow writers).
Writers are too “close” to our stories to see them as objectively as we need to to edit our work well; that’s okay, it just means we need to ask for help.
If your word count falls way past the average, you’ve likely followed some unnecessary plot bunnies or dwelled too much on a plot element or two. Ask your critique-givers what plot points or scenes they think aren’t necessary. Take time to gather that feedback from multiple people, then really mull it over. If what they said feels right, put in the work and kill a few darlings. (SJM basically had to rewrite TOG before publishing! It might be a lot of work, but it’s going to be worth it!)
Whatever you do, don’t delete the things you remove from your manuscript.
Keep them in their own document somewhere. You don’t know what they might spark later. And if it’s a scene you really love, you can offer it as bonus content later!
If you can’t possibly revise any more and your manuscript is still “too long,” why not go the Tolkien route?
A potential publisher will be more willing to take a chance on it.
And if your goal is to self-publish, this is still a good option. It’s not cheaper for you to get two ISBN numbers and two covers designed, but a new reader will be much more willing to invest their time into a new author when a book is 300 pages long instead of 600.
And a book that’s so much shorter won’t need such a high price tag attached to it, so it’ll be easier for a reader to purchase; you’ll get more readers, more sales, more reviews that convince more readers to buy your book... It makes sense to me.
And, bonus, you don’t have to scramble to write a sequel!
At the end of the day, what you publish and how you publish are decisions only you can make.
Remember, though, that agents and publishers will not work with you if your book falls outside a specific range for word count.
If your book is way outside of that range and you decide to self-publish instead of changing your manuscript, I’m not going to drive to your home and stop you.
I would just caution you against it.
You could be an exception, of course. You could do the exact opposite of what I just said and get all the fangirls and sales you could ever hope for! I follow authors who fit that description.
Every reader is different. Every writer is different. Every story is different. If you’re creating something for creativity’s sake, there’s not really a magic number for how long your book should or shouldn’t be. There are guidelines, though, and there are reasons they exist—and it’s not all because of capitalism.
I’ll talk soon about what those specific guidelines are, give you some instructions for self-editing, and talk about some of the issues I see in manuscripts that are “too long.”
