I’m a pretty decent
writer. And well before I decided to submit a novel manuscript for
publication, I did my homework. I knew about query letters, slush
piles, and house formats. I knew some publishing houses don’t take
unagented submissions and some do. I knew how to find the correct
name and address for a submission, and to address the query letter TO
that person. I knew how to make my query letter POP.
But once I got into the
industry (translated – I had a manuscript under contract), I
discovered that there are a few little details they don’t tell you
in author’s school.
Sub-tidbit: Everybody
knows not to trust spelling and grammar checkers, right? They don’t
know there from they’re from their… (finish the statement on your
own). Good. ‘Nuff said. On to the serious stuff.
Tidbit One: Different
publishers have different definitions of what constitutes novel
length. For some, it’s anything over forty thousand words. For
others, it’s sixty, and for most in my genre (science fiction and
mystery, often combined) it’s around one hundred thousand. This is
a rough rule of thumb, and generally the bigger the number, the more
leeway you have, plus or minus, in your word count. But make sure you
know what the definition is for your genre, and MAKE IT LONG ENOUGH,
or you could run into problems.
Yep, been there, done that. Nobody gave me a t-shirt though. Should have.
Yep, been there, done that. Nobody gave me a t-shirt though. Should have.
-Stephanie Osborn
http://www/stephanie-osborn.com
2 comments:
That was another thing I learned last weekend. The amount of words that constitute a book change depending on genre and whom you are talking to. I had always assumed the very minimum was 50,000 words. It's funny how you don't know that you don't know something until someone points it out. (That made sense in my head, but I'm not sure the idea carried over.)
This is very, very true. And that's one reason I included it in the blog tips.
And of course then there's the novella, which is shorter than a novel for a given genre, and again has its own word count range.
You have to know what you're writing and who you're writing it for, then aim for that target.
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