Im writing a chick lit novel that I wish to publish soon. Does anybody know how important is word count to publishers?
While my unpublished novel isn’t exactly chick lit, the agents and editors I’ve spoken to seemed to agree that a novel from an unpublished author should be between 100,000 and 120,000 words, and if you go outside those limits you need to have an exceptional reason why you couldn’t edit the story to fit that length. As they never get tired of saying, agents and editors receive far more manuscripts than they could ever hope to publish, and they have to weed them out somehow. You should narrow your list of possible agents and editors down to the ones that might publish your type of story. Then you can usually find their guidelines on their web sites. These might say specifically what word counts they want. This site has lots of useful information: http://www.writersmarket.com/ More important than the number of words is making sure that every word carries its weight and does useful work. You shouldn’t add a bunch of unnecessary wor
