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Does anyone know what the ideal novel word counts are for submission to agents and publishers? I know a novel is usually defined as at least 80K words, but not sure how much it damages your chances going under. I'm currently revising and making some additions to my "novel" but it's about 61,000 words now. I'm worried about bogging it down with stuff it doesn't need so I'm on the fence as to whether this is novel material or a novella. I'm expecting I can get to about 70,000 without seriously bogging it down, but any more than that is pushing it.
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Jul 21, 2012 01:22
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I have a "What genre am I?" question. I've been calling my novel a western when I describe it to others, but I'm almost ready to start submitting it to agents and publishers and I'm wondering if I shouldn't reconsider historical fiction or YA. About 1/3rd takes place on the frontier, but the last 2/3rds takes place in St. Louis, on a Mississippi riverboat and in Baton Rouge, so by the definitions I found it could be called historical fiction. But it does feature gunfights, safecracking and chases, which seem to fit more in a western. Also, one of the two POV characters is a 16 year old girl, which would seem to qualify it as YA. I hadn't written it with YA in mind considering the violence, though. I don't want to call it something it's not, but my understanding is there's not a huge market for westerns and I haven't found a whole lot of agents that represent westerns.
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Apr 12, 2013 16:31
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Panda So Panda posted:To be safe, I would say historical fiction. Thanks for the advice everyone. I think historical fiction is the way to go unless an agent specifically mentions looking for westerns.
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Apr 14, 2013 23:21
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