Slogging away at the novel.

[matt_doyle]

I am, I think, finally committed to The Hellion Prince as my next project; I have 27,000+ words written, in nonlinear, fragmentary scenes (I estimate at least 10k of these words will be cut eventually, but still).

This is a much bigger book than I thought it was.

Running In Her Veins, when all was said and done, tallied up at 91,723 words. That's not a very long novel, maybe 300 pages at most. I knew Hellion Prince would be longer - maybe half as long again, I estimated, a nice respectable 400-pager.

Even if I assume those 10k words of fluff are going to be cut... I'm not even ten percent done with the damned thing. Even if I were, 170,000 words is still Later Harry Potter Territory, and more than that... yikes.

Presuming I ever finish this, how the Hell will I sell it?

Comments

[kessie.livejournal.com]

From my years of haunting agent and publishing blogs, I've come to understand the general consensus is that most debut novels should be around 100,000 if they're adult genre fiction, or absolutely up to 120,000 for fantasy. (In the case of YA fantasy, which I'm working on now, the upper limit would be 80,000.) There is a certain amount of wiggle room in terms of word-count for later novels, but 170,000 words is... well, 170,000 words. I think that's longer than the average GRRM and lots of words = lots of money in printing costs.

So, yeah, I think you'll probably have to edit the hell out of it. There are always exceptions, of course, like Patrick Rothfuss, but the impression I've received is that it has to be really damn spectacular to be said exception, you know?

[capnflynn.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Finish first, then worry about selling. Maybe start working on selling RIHV to polish those skills while you write Hellion Prince?

So do you typically write non-linear-ish-ly? O__O Everyone's techniques are so different!

[pillow-of-doom.livejournal.com]

robert jordan, anyone?