I’ve been working for several years on a novel, and in a lot of ways it’s been fun. I have some very interconnected themes, some plot twists that tread the line between being surprising, and meaningful, and a fair few characters that develop through a lengthy confrontation.
I’ve started to consult an editor about tuning it into something publishable. Due to the way I was writing it, I only recently got the tools to calculate a total word count, and we realized that in the end, it’s far longer than I wanted it to be; on the order of 370,000 words.
Apparently people like George R. R. Martin can sometimes get away with this length, but I understand this is way out of line for a first time author. I’ve been looking at ways of trimming this down, and admittedly, there’s a few chapters with low hanging fruit I can get rid of; but I think I’m in need of a lot more than that. My editor was suggesting getting rid of entire main characters that don’t have as much development as others.
But at a lot of turns, it feels like trimming out X causes 5 other problems (plot points lost, throwbacks disconnected) that might threaten to either make the book soulless, not make sense, or even fail to reduce word count when I tie things together.
The option of simply splitting it into 2+ books has been there, but…it doesn’t seem practical. There’s a very clear villain, with a steady buildup to their dethroning, that would feel unsatisfying pushed off to another story.
If I assume publishers, or even just readers, would show only mild interest in a 300k word book, it makes me feel a bit stuck. I’ve already committed a lot of time to the story, and it feels grueling to go back and redo large parts of it; while also aiming to make it shorter.
Curious if anyone has thoughts on what they’d do in this situation.
Really appreciate the insight. Finding people willing to commit to reading has definitely been a challenge; many people so far have idly promised to give it a look, only to never actually read it. So, getting feedback on whether there are bits people lose interest in has been difficult.
Thankfully, this is never expected to be my primary income, and I’ve even strongly considered donating the revenue to some charity. I still have little knowledge of the publishing requirements; I guess my main goal is I just want to get eyes on it.
I had to look up what “progression fantasy” refers to. I can see the appeal, but even with a lot of fantasy elements in my book, the main characters are all humans with no magical abilities. I do have this kind of rule of “unspoken leveling”, where the more character development someone has gone through, the more likely they are to win a fight - even if there’s been no real combat training to justify that outcome. The characters achieve some big societal changes through the book without ever getting to a point they could defeat entire squadrons of soldiers, so maybe that will satisfy a lot of the same urges.