McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Length
Kali:
From the rather extensive reading I've been doing (agent-shopping), no. That depends strongly on the genre, though.
Most agents say editors (and therefore the agents themselves) are looking for urban fantasy novels in the 80-100k range for a first novel. Once you've gotten the first couple under your belt, they're willing to let you go longer without giving you the hairy eyeball.
Young adult novels can be shorter. Epic fantasy is expected to be longer.
That said, I bet Flowers for Algernon would still get the nod from most agents/editors if it were published today, and it's a short one at also around 50k. Write great, and they won't care about the length.
That said, long or very short first novels are the exception. And, as the saying goes, plan on being the rule and not the exception.
Enjorous:
That is an important distinction. What qualifies as a novel, and what qualifies as a publishable novel.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Kali on May 27, 2010, 05:02:00 PM ---Most agents say editors (and therefore the agents themselves) are looking for urban fantasy novels in the 80-100k range for a first novel.
--- End quote ---
Fair enough; I am not particularly focused on urban fantasy or well informed in that specific direction.
--- Quote ---That said, I bet Flowers for Algernon would still get the nod from most agents/editors if it were published today, and it's a short one at also around 50k. Write great, and they won't care about the length.
--- End quote ---
The novel version of Flowers for Algernon is an expansion from a rather successful shorter version, fwiw.
There's definitely been a trend since the 1950s and 60s to longer novels; on the other hand, there's also been a trend in the past decade or so, given the big-box bookstores' price-cap on hardback fiction, towards shorter novels than previous in the fantasy field. I know Charlie Stross' The Family Trade, the first logical-volume/story-unit of the Merchant Princes books, was split into two physical volumes on these grounds, only a few years after some things intended as multivolume were being published in single volumes because of the accepted wisdom being fat fantasy novels outsell thin fantasy novels.
To summarise the summary of the summary; William Goldman was right. Nobody knows anything.
Enjorous:
--- Quote from: neurovore on May 27, 2010, 05:19:38 PM ---
To summarise the summary of the summary; William Goldman was right. Nobody knows anything.
--- End quote ---
Ain't that the truth.
Kali:
Which is why you do agent research, find out what agents want, and give them that. Sure, you can sell a book that bucks the system, but that doesn't make it the SMART way to get a book published. That's why I said plan on being the rule and not the exception.
It's so unbelievably, ridiculously easy to get rejected. Why on earth would you want to give an agent an instant reason to reject you? Length will hit in the query letter. They won't even GET to your amazing, singular, one-of-a-kind, once-in-a-lifetime manuscript. They'll see, "This story is a completed alternate history novel of 210,000 words..." and hit the auto-reject button.
Let's just take one agent (my first-choice agent), Jennifer Jackson. She's Jim's agent, btw. She keeps a blog and very kindly posts the stats on how many query letters she's read in a given week, how many requests-for-partials she's sent out, what genres they were in, etc. I'll go back a post on her blog, since this past week she was at a conference and her numbers are a little off for her, but here's what she posted for the week of 5/7/2010:
# of queries read this week: 268
# of partials/manuscripts requested: 1
genre of partials/manuscripts requested: YA
400+ queries awaiting review
oldest query in the queue: 4/12/2010
ONE partial requested, out of 268 letters she read. ONE.
Now, you can go ahead and buck trends if you want. Against those kinds of odds? I'm doing everything humanly possible to make my first novel publishable. I'll write my 250k word epic later, once I've established some cred.
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