@monksjj your book is way too long. You either need to adjust your prose, cut out unnecessary dribble or exposition, and tighten descriptions and story. Even big names do not hit that level of word count unless highly sought after. If you are debut you will be turned down unless you drop closer to 120k and even then is pushing it unless you can justify every single word. There are paper shortages, and publishers are not going to risk printing a run on a debut author with a book larger than Game of Thrones.

Q: 03/30/2025
77k Queer YA Romantasy

horror
Q: 03/29/25; 50 pages per request

@monksjj You definitely need to educate yourself and gain a little perspective. I do not mean to come across as patronising or rude or arrogant, but what little context or history I can glean from your comment... you do not sound ready to become a published author. For starters, if you have not had anything published before, an agent is going to take you complaining about being told your manuscript is too long at 170,000 words as unprofessional. Yes, they do read these comment sections.

When I briefly studied screen production, a professor told me that the first thing you have to ask yourself about a part of your script is if it tells the audience anything about your world, characters, or their path that the audience did not already know. If the piece of script does not tell the audience something they did not already know, out it goes. A debut that is 170,000 words suggests that there may be things in it which are, to put it another way, redundant. My first manuscript was around 200,000 or thereabouts. When I finally figured where the story was and what I needed to tell the audience, the manuscript came down to 120,000 ...

The genre also determines, to an extent, the desirable word count. A fantasy or science fiction novel generally needs to be 100,000 to 120,000 to properly tell a good story. But the further you go over that count, the bigger the alarm bell the agent hears. There are sites around that state the average or expected word counts by genre. I find it hard to get a story under 100,000 words once it has all of the pieces it needs to tell the story well. But that is another point you need to consider. I do not know how to put URLs in a comment or if it is allowed but here goes:

https://thewritelife.com/how-many-words-in-a-novel/ One source for my word count points.

*Deep breath* ... How much of the worldbuilding in your novel is necessary for the audience to make sense of the story? This is a question fantasy and science fiction authors grapple with all of the time. An excellent example of this is the opening crawl in Star Wars. George Lucas' original version rambled about the fall of the Old Republic, the attacks upon the Jedi, and so forth. The version that ended up in the theatrical release told us about the Death Star, Princess Leia, the plans of the Death Star, and Leia's mission to get the plans into the hands of someone who can figure out how to destroy the Death Star. In other words, like every good opening crawl, it told us what we needed to know for everything in the coming film to make sense, and nothing else. Indeed, a smarter adult could infer some of the things in the opening crawl from the words and actions of Imperials in the film.

Another good example is the 1984 atrocity called Dune and the first film Denis Villeneuve made based on Dune. The earlier film has Virginia Madsen staring into the camera and telling us a lot of things that we did not need to know. The most critical piece of information, that the spice can only be found on one planet, is an "oh, by the way" at the end of said introduction. In the first Villeneuve film, the opening narration gives us the bare bones from the limited perspective of a native woman, ends with her question about who the next oppressors will be, and the film tells us what we need to know when we need to know it.

These examples are crucial things for science fiction and fantasy authors to understand. How much information are you giving? How much of this information is needed? Do they need to know the information right now? Is this the only way you can deliver the information? I did a lot of film critiquing before I made a serious effort to finish a manuscript, and these questions mattered.

My readers do not need to know that my heroic Dwarvish King has a total of eleven aunts and uncles, nor that one of them is in reality his father, until a future story that may or may not get written. Right now, all they need to know is that his ostensible father is a complete bastard, that every good thing in his boyhood including his name is the direct result of his Human mother telling his "father" the word no in multiple languages, and that a lot of what is going on in the novel at the beginning is a tertiary consequence of how short the life of a Human like his mother is compared to the life of a Dwarf.

Similarly, they do not necessarily need to know that the first group of Dwarf folk did not record which women were the mothers of which line of their first King's descendants because they feared discriminatory infighting, not in this novel. They may need to know that the hero Dwarf King is a direct descendant of this first King, however.

Just like I have used so many words to impress upon you that you need to look at every word in your manuscript and ask yourself "can my audience learn something new from this?". Because if any agent agrees to look at your whole manuscript, you better believe *they* will be asking the same thing about every sentence you wrote.

Adventure Fantasy 80k

QM 7/28/24
FR 11/12/24