After a whole year of hard work, I'm almost finished with my 42nd "Sojourn" book, and it's a long one. I have a question: I'm ready to start pitching this book to agencies and publishers, because I've been told that once a book is self-published and selling, it is difficult to convince an agent to represent it. In a previous query to an agent, I was told that a book typically needs to be at least 70,000 words to be considered for publication by an agent, because when I queried this agent with one of my books, they said it was too short, because it was under 70,000 words. (Not by much, though, the final word count of the book I pitched was around 68,000.) Now I'm concerned that this book I'm about to finish might be too long. I've always just believed that a story should have as many or as few words as necessary to tell it, but apparently, there are certain word count standards or preferences that some agents have. Is there an industry-wide standard for word counts, or does it vary from agent to agent?
On Writing : Almost done with my 42nd book in the "Sojourn" saga: question about book word counts. by Steven Gamella
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I'm not in the publishing world (mostly because I can never finish a book I'm trying to write) but friends who are have told me that anything over 120K words can be a challenge for some publishers. If course, nobody told Victor Hugo when Les mis came in at over 500K words but not sure that's a proper current ballast.
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Sam is correct. Anything over 120K is a lofty print and read. 70K-116K is a feel-good place to land for publishers and a coming in-on-the-dime word count. Keep in mind, that 80K word count places you at around 240 pages.The reference that someone made to you that a self-published book is difficult for an agent to represent is partly true, UNLESS you self-publish with the goal of selling 10,000 copies. If you hit this mark, it will attract an agent and publisher, not deter.