#industry insights
First things first, if you write for fun and fun alone then this is not a post aimed at you. Don’t even bother reading it. This post is aimed at writers who want other people to read their stories, especially in a professional context. Fair warning, I tend towards the super blunt on this topic because overwritten story are one of my pet peeves.
There are industry standards for word counts and you need to pay attention to them because they exist for some very good reasons which I’ll get into in a second. Before that, I want to add that I’m not giving you the standards because they can vary widely by genre. If you want to know what the standards are, google “genre word counts” and read a few blogs to get a general idea as to what people are saying about your genre of choice.
Now, back to the main point: why do word count standards exist?
Publishers look at overly long books the same way that we’d look at a 6 hour movie: if it’s that long, and you’re expecting a reader to invest that much time into it, it better be pretty damn good. Along the same lines, the fact that it’s that long indicates that there is a good chance that your story is going to be something readers will not want to read and, yes, I’m saying that as someone who has several favorite books that defy these rules.
They defy the rules and still got published for two reasons: they really are exceptional and most of them were written by established authors AKA those with previous works. Works that followed the rules and that’s worth paying attention to. The more well-known you are, the more readers and publishing houses are willing to risk on you. If you start out trying to publish your 300K monolith, you will not get published and very few people will pay money to give something that long a shot if they haven’t heard good things about your writing.
To drive this in, let’s once again look at Tumblr’s darling: Harry Potter. Book one is 76,944 words. Book two is 85,141 words. It’s not until book four, which is around the point that the series got truly popular, that the word count broke the rules and shot up to 190,637 words.
From book four on, Harry Potter got to defy the rules because people were obsessed at that point and it didn’t matter if the books were bloated to the point of major pacing issues because potter mania was strong and JK Rowling would have had to do something truly crazy to make people stop reading. (Yes, I don’t think the last 3 books are all that well written and I know that’s heresy, but we’re not getting into that here. If you seriously need me to defend myself, go ahead and send me an ask. Just note that I did not say they’re terrible or that I hate them. I only said they have issues.)
If you’re curious, the site www.readinglength.com will tell you the word count of most books. I’d recommend typing in some of your favorites, just to see where they land.
A final note mostly aimed at fanfiction writers: People put up with things in fandoms that they don’t in the “real world”. Someone will suffer through an overwritten, 250+ word monstrosity because they really want to see your take on their favorite characters in a setting no one else has tried yet, but if you try to change the names and get that thing published? Yeah, you’re going to have to chop the word count in half and I’m saying this as someone who has read a good deal of fanfiction in her day. I have never come across a fic that had an unusually high word count (150k+) that wouldn’t have benefitted from being cut down. Most of them, even the 200k+ ones, could have happily been cut to 100k and been better for it.
