Word Count Wanderings

Word count sucks. There, I've said it. Word count is a necessary evil. Word count makes the world go around. A couple weeks ago, I posted an entry on Frankie's blog about how word count matters. I've done research on and off over the last year or so on word count, and have come to this conclusion.

There is no one answer. I will use middle grade and young adult for my examples.

Chuck Sambuchino, editor for Writer's Digest Books wrote the definitive post on word count for novels and children's books.
MG - 20k - 45k
YA - 55k - 70k (add 5k for fantasy/sci-fi)

Colleen Lindsay from Fineprint Literary Agency, posted this entry on word counts and novel length.
MG - 25k - 40k

YA - 50k - 80k (longer for paranormal or fantasy)

Nathan Bransford from Curtis Brown, Ltd, posted this entry on novel word count. He's not a stickler for word count. In his words, "If it works, it works." His larger point was that agents will reject you outright if your word count is outrageously high.

Kristin Nelson of Nelson Literary Agency posted this entry on the word count question. She points out that it's the completely wrong question to ask. The right question is to ask how important pacing is in your novel.  Length won't matter if the pacing of the novel makes it such that the reader doesn't care. Case in point: Harry Potter & Twilight. (among many others I can think of). She would know. She sold Helen Stringer’s Spellbinder, which my daughter, wife and I recently enjoyed.

On the flip side, Michael Bourret of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management posted this query critique on a relatively short middle grade novel. (28k words). He wasn't worried about the word count, thinking that they could expand the book in the editorial process if need be.

To complicate matters, in my research I found an agent or two that categorized some well known middle grade novels as young adult. These are definitely MG books - they're shelved with MG, the characters are middle schoolers, and the themes are very much MG. Yet, those novels had 80k word count. If you were to query such an agent with a middle grade novel of 40k words, would they think twice when reading the query letter?

In the end, I think you tell the story that's in your head. Then revise the heck out of the thing - lop off what doesn't move the plot along. Ensure the pacing is appropriate for your target audience. Get people to read it and make sure it's just right. When you're done and you think it's right, if it falls well outside the typical range for your genre and target audience, you have a decision to make. You can query anyway, but keep in mind that you're lowering your chances overall. As you can see above, some folks are less concerned than others. Remember that publishing is a business. And if the story is just right, decisions made based on word count are often driven by the business side of things, especially for debut authors.

An update to the agent and publisher list

Many of you may know I maintain a substantial list of Young Adult and Middle Grade publishers and literary agents. It's been over two years since I started updating it. The list started out as something I did for myself - a place to capture all the potential agents or editors I might query. Over time, I opened up the list to the cool folks of the Young Adult Novel Workshop over at writing.com, and then to the rest of the writing.com community. Maybe a year ago, I opened it up to everyone, and much to my surprise, the thing's become reasonably popular.

Fire up google and type "middle grade publishers". Today it comes up second in the search results. "YA agents"? third, or maybe second, if you consider the first two sites are presented in a hierarchy. What's pretty cool is that I really haven't tried to make it easily found, so it's been organic in nature.


I try to keep the content fresh, often checking that the links still work and that the agents and publishers are still in business. I'm not paid for putting anyone on the list. In fact, here's the "caveat emptor" I stick at the top of the list:

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Publishers and agents appear on this list because I found them in any number of relevant places: WritersMarket, Publisher's Marketplace, conferences, word-of-mouth, etc. I have only done some basic checking on each of these folks in sources such as Predators & Editors and AbsoluteWrite. Things change rapidly, so before you consider or contact anyone on this list, please do your own research.

If you see anyone on this list that you feel is disreputable, please contact me through my blog (That's this place)

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Going forward, I'll post some information whenever I make any updates to the list, which I did today.

Publishers added
Lands Atlantic Publishing
Action Publishing
Silver Moon Press

Literary Agents added
Levine Greenberg Literary Agency
DeFiore and Company
Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises

Sadly, Jenny Rappaport has given up on the agenting biz, so I've dropped her from the list. I also dropped a couple other links and fixed some others.

I hope this helps all you authors in search of a YA or Middle Grade agent or publisher.

A little Mythos and a lot of the agent/publisher list.

I seem to have forgotten that my blog isn't all about Mythos/Creatures. I have been busy writing, though. I'm in the middle of a chapter with its own complexities. It's really the first time I've ever written a romantic scene. I mean this sucker is by no means a romance novel, but there's teens with raging hormones, so y'know, it kind of comes up. But I really don't want to leave this chapter without certain aspects of it being "just right". I think I'm getting close to where I want it to be. But I'm ready to move on to the second half of the chapter.

I also spent time last night with something I've neglected for over a month. I have been maintaining a list of publishers and agents for the middle grade and young adult market. I do this in my portfolio on Writing.com. Since I write in the realm of MG/YA, and a lot of my writer friends do the same, this started out as a way for me to share with them some of the info I'd found. Considering all that I've learned from these folks, it was the absolute least I could do.

Medeia Sharif complimented me today on the list, and this caused me to go back and look at it in the larger sense. I'm generally in there adding or editing the content, validating the links and whatnot. This time I just looked at the whole. The first thing I noticed was that I actually began this thing over two years ago. What? Are you kidding me? Has it been that long? Sheesh.

I also noticed the size. My list currently has 36 publishers, and 104, count 'em, 104 agents. It's like I'm a stalker or something. I've also got some other helpful links on the list. I try to update the page about once a month. Change appears to be a constant within the publishing industry, so there's never a shortage of new information to put out there.

So please check out the list, use it, share it, and I'll try to keep it up to date. And if you have anything you think I should add or drop, please let me know!

The post office doesn't want me published

I think I've lost confidence in the USPS. You know who they are? The postal service? Rain, nor slow, nor even sleet and all that fancy talk? Or maybe it's the particular post office I used? Dunno.

Why, you ask? I just received confirmation that a partial I sent out for Midian never reached its destination. Fortunately, this very nice agent is cool with, and actually prefers that I resend it via eMail. Shame, that I didn't know that before I shipped it off.

But it doesn't stop there. Last year, I shipped off a query with accompanying chapters and synopsis to a well known editor of a well known publishing house. I had met this editor at the SCBWI conference in New Jersey last year. There's been no response and she always responds. It may take time, but she responds. Common thread? Snail mail from this same post office.

Argh!!!! From now on, everything goes via eMail, if possible. If I have to send via snail mail, I'm shelling out the extra cashola for delivery confirmation. Oh, and I'll definitely use a different post office.

Even the best agents can struggle.

This truly blows my mind, but is an indication of the publishing industry. There's this author I know through WDC - she's literally one of the first folks I interacted with and pointed me in a number of good directions. She writes awesome, and I mean truly fantastic science fiction, both novels & short stories. She's had her shorts published in real print magazines. She has a following of sorts as well.

This awesome writer got signed by a very well known, well respected, big time New York agent.

It's been two and a half years, and no interest from any publishers.

Can you believe it? All I can say is.... Damn.

You spend years trying to get an agent, and then the economy just plain tanks. The big houses are being incredibly selective. At BEA this year, word was many houses are looking for so-called can't miss books. Celebrity-penned books are in with big advances. Of course, when are they never in?

I think I'm going to start looking at the smaller publishers.

By the way, if you're still curious about the difference between YA & Middle Grade, here's another good link. But, I love this one on Literary Lab, courtesy of Tess Hilmo.

Know your genre

I received a form letter email rejection today from an Jessica Regel. Mind you, I thought this had the potential to be a reach. She is cool with fantasy if it's YA/Middle Grade, however, she seems to prefer Contemporary Fantasy versus other forms of the genre. She likes her stories rooted in our world. While I like to think of The Children of Midian as contemporary fantasy, our world plays a role only initially until Elliot stumbles through a portal into the parallel world Midian. So, technically it's High Fantasy.

The classification of stories into genres is a topic, which I imagine both frustrates and challenges writers to pigeonhole their stories. I once had a short story rejected by a magazine because it was too sci-fi for them. This was in my very early and naive days of writing and trying to get published. I had honestly never thought of my short-story-on-the-verge-of-novella in terms genre. It took place here on earth with regular people, only the planet turned out to be a computer simulation that needed rebooting periodically. In retrospect, I suppose it was sci-fi.

I've gone to three writing conferences over the last three years and I've learned two often contradictory lessons.

1. If you want to get published you might want to know in which hole to stuff your pigeon of a story.
   
2. The story and good writing is what's important. So, just send it.

The problem with #1 is that, like most things in this world, not everything is black and white. It is often difficult to typecast a novel into one tidy little spot, plus that tiger actually grows new spots over time, and his old ones have to shift around to make room. Make sure you get it right and make sure what you query with matches what you say it is. Don't bother sending a query about your urban fantasy to an agent who is looking for that genre, and then include a synopsis in which a farm boy rides a dragon as it does battle with a Krakken in the North Sea. She might notice.

As for #2, well, not everyone agrees with it. Secondly, someone has to actually read a few of your chapters to get a feel for the quality of the story and the writing. In many cases, you need to get past the query and onto a partial for this rule to apply. If you make an unbelievable pitch in your query, you've at least piqued their interest, and it's also a good sign of your writing skills, or at least your sales skills. :-)

This of course goes beyond genre or literary category. If you write books for kids - well you've got numerous categories there - Middle Grade, Young Adult, chapter books, transition books, and so on. There is even rumor of a new category that is somewhere between Middle Grade and Young Adult. You see? A new spot on the tiger forcing the other spots to get out of the way!

Querying exclusively

Normally, I will only query to an agent or editor who accepts simultaneous submissions, meaning they are okay with me querying other agents/editors at the same time, as long as I let them know if another party is interested. There was one notable exception, though.

Last year, I attended the New Jersey SCBWI Conference where I was fortunate enough to sit in on a session on character development given by Cheryl Klein, Senior Editor at Arthur A. Levine Books (an imprint of Scholastic). I even thrust my hand in the air and asked a question that she graciously answered.

And then I went up to her and complimented her on her web site, with its many wonderful writer's resources. By the way, her new site is still a bit under construction, but her blog is quite good. I am fairly certain I must've appeared to be a stalker the way I walked up to her in the conference, and had to rush off as the next speaker commenced. Ah, well.

Anyway, I submitted The Children of Midian to her in a query packet via snail mail (which she prefers) last October, with SQUID written on the envelope (if you ready her submission guidelines, you'll understand why), and a series of SCBWI conference stickers affixed in a few prominent places. She also prefers not to receive simultaneous submissions, but will accept them nonetheless. I took the hint and submitted exclusively because, in this case I really thought it was a fit and she was the editor I really wanted to work with.

Well, it's nine months later, and no word. Based on what I know and have read about her--she always responds--I wonder if my packet got lost in the mail. If so, I guess I'll chalk it up to a lost opportunity. I mean, I had the stickers and everything! (I think they help keep you off the slush pile or something.)

But if not lost in the mail, a few months back I assumed that no response meant "no", so I began to query again. I'm not big on sending a reminder eMail or letter to an editor or agent, unless they explicitly say to. The one time I did, the "no" came back fast! I'm sure the "no" would've come back anyway, but I'm superstitious about such things now.

I haven't given up hope, though. Onward, I say!

Have any of you had similar or related experiences?