Your Book is Too Long
A guest post by Eli Keren
I’m delighted to welcome Eli Keren today with a guest post on editing our novels. Eli is a literary agent and freelance editor and he kindly judged our First Chapter Competition for us a couple of years ago. If you’ve got a novel you want feedback on, this year’s competition closes on Feb 28th and you can win a feedback meeting with our literary agent judge, Louise Buckley. Get all the info on that here.
Now, over to Eli with his great guide to making our books less wordy!
With love,
Amanda 💙
Your Book is Too Long
Your book is too long. I’m really sorry, but it is.
Don’t fight me on this. Take a moment. Accept it. It’s okay if you have to walk away and come back to read this later. But when you do, I’m going to talk you through my top tips for cutting that word count back and why it matters.
Focus on Purpose
Every book has a purpose. Sometimes it’s to tell a good story, sometimes it’s to make a reader feel a very specific feeling at just the right moment or to communicate an experience that you need to share with the world. Sometimes a book actively sets out to change the world and sometimes it just sets out to change the life of the reader for as long as they’re reading it, but every book is for something. So before we dig into the fact that your book is too long (sorry, it is), I want you to take a minute to ask yourself – what is your book for? If your answer is ‘sales and income’ then I’m afraid you need to dig a little deeper. When a writer identifies their purpose and pulls it off, sales and income follow. If sales and income are the sum total of a book’s purpose, then it’s unlikely to ever find its readership simply because it’s a book that the world doesn’t need. So take some time to ask yourself, what do you want your book to achieve?
Purpose looks different for everyone. Maybe there’s one great emotional crescendo of your book and the purpose of the entire story is to put the audience in exactly the emotional state they need to be in to receive that conclusion and be hit by it like a ton of bricks. Maybe your book has something to say about the world that will fundamentally change a reader’s mind about something. Maybe you’ve had an incredible experience and you want to share the emotional journey you went on with your readers. Ask yourself why you’re doing this – and then ask yourself if that paragraph you’re on the fence about cutting is pulling its weight.
Once you’ve pinned your purpose down, you can cut with clarity. If you’re undecided about cutting a certain sub-plot, character or episode, reframe the question according to your book’s purpose. What does that section contribute to what you want your book to achieve? If that section is gone, is your book farther away from your goal, about the same, or might it even be closer? Identifying your book’s purpose is the single most useful tool in an editorial arsenal, it is the compass that guides every choice and the roots from which the tree of your book must grow. And if any paragraph, any sentence, any word isn’t pulling its weight and contributing to that purpose, cut it.
Think Laterally
Sometimes a small change can have a big impact downstream. If you’re looking for a thread to cut, think about what the rest of your book will look like without it. Perhaps there’s a minor character that, if cut from the early book, can save you plenty of words down the line because their later scenes and development are no longer necessary. You want to be careful here, what you don’t want to do is try to cut a character or sub-plot but redraft the rest of the book and keep it intact, rewriting every scene so that the character isn’t present and the sub-plot isn’t alluded to. Doing this can often save you a disappointingly low number of words. What you want is to cut a character or sub-plot decisively, cut every scene they appear in, cut every conversation that plot produced, and watch the words tumble out of your manuscript. Find that long thread that runs throughout your book but doesn’t actually entwine with your book’s purpose and cut it.
Play the long game and consider carefully which of your candidate for cutting can free up the most space. It’ll likely also be the option that gives you the most work to do, and a lot of that work will be intricate and fiddly, but it’ll also be worth it.
Skip Ahead
So you’ve figured out what your book is for and you’ve figured out what’s not contributing to that purpose and you’ve cut it and your book is still too long. What now? It’s time to get practical. Here’s a little piece of advice I give almost every single client at some point in the editorial process:
Skip the first and start reading from the second – it doesn’t matter what. Read each chapter or section from the second paragraph. If it still makes sense, cut the first. Read each paragraph from the second sentence. If it still makes sense, cut the first. Hell, read your whole book from the second chapter if you’re brave enough.
You’d be surprised how frequently this works. So often we open a paragraph or section with a nice bit of scene setting that doesn’t actually contribute to the audience’s experience of reading your work. It doesn’t add content and when it adds context it’s often context the reader can do perfectly well without. I say this to my fiction clients as often as I say it to my non-fiction clients, and it applies to far more than just books. Skim through this article and try it yourself – I think I could shave about 125 words. That’s around 7.5% of my word count. Apply that logic to an overlong novel and you’d be amazed what you can save.
And that prologue? Cut it.
And if All Else Fails…
A client came to me once with a romantasy novel that, after a few rounds of developmental edits, had bloated to 147k words. He was happy with it, the plot worked, the pace was good, and there weren’t any sections or characters that felt weak or cuttable. The plot didn’t sag in the middle, the conclusion didn’t drag on, there was right balance of longing to spice. And it was 147 thousand bloody words long. We needed to cut it.
The book came to around 365 pages, with an average of around 400 words per page. To get it under 125k, I needed to cut 15% of the total volume of the book – around 60 words per page. So that’s exactly what I did. I cut 60 words per page, from every single page. It was painstaking. I kept a calculator open at all times. Every time I started a page I quickly typed in the current word count and subtracted 60 from it, and then I cut until my little word counter in the bottom left corner hit that number. It wasn’t a perfect process. Some pages only offered me 30 or 40 words that I felt I could cut. Others gave me a hundred or more. Some pages needed tweaking and ended up slightly longer than I’d started with. A couple of scenes suddenly felt like they were costing my client more in words than they were contributing in plot and got cut entirely. The sudden deletion of 500 words looked delicious when a short scene wasn’t pulling its weight and I’d had a run of pages refusing to offer up their allotted 60 sacrifices. In the end, the final product came in at 123k words, and was much stronger for it.
It was mostly trivial stuff. ‘He looked up and saw…’ worked just as well when cut to ‘He saw…’. ‘He crossed the room and opened the door to find her standing there…’ could easily be ‘He opened the door and found her standing there…’ or even ‘He opened the door. There she was.’ Cuts like that might seem insignificant both in the word count and in the reading, but make enough of them and it starts to show on both fronts. The word count comes steadily down, and the reading becomes breezier, snappier and more focussed.
Some Context
Look, I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m being extreme, that everyone says this but nobody really means it, that plenty of long books sell. Let me soften the blow a little here by telling you why this is so important.
Long books aren’t selling. Of course some long books are selling but they’re mostly by authors with a Booker or a million sales under their belt already. Most long books aren’t selling, especially long debuts. And at the same time, agents and publishers are so overwhelmed by submissions that we’re all looking for any excuse to pass on each submission we’re sent to keep churning through our submissions inboxes. Nothing helps me manage my time like a glaring red flag. So if you’re sending a book to agents that’s 50k words ahead of where it should be, you’re just offering them an instant excuse to reject your work without even engaging with it.
You might be screaming at your screen now But why?! My work is good! People will read it if I can just get it in front of them! Well, to start with, you probably don’t know that there’s a paper crisis going on right now. Raw material costs have risen sharply since late 2024 as various governments around the world cut down on deforestation while energy prices remain high. That’s right, the cost of living crisis has even hit paper. A publisher has to take this into account when running the numbers to determine whether they’re going to make an offer on a book. The higher the production costs, the more sales they need to be confident of before they can act, which means every extra page they’d have to print winds up your ‘losses’ column while your ‘profits’ column remains static.
Then there’s translation – the longer a book is, the more expensive it is to translate, the less attractive it looks to a foreign rights department, the less profitable it looks to a publisher or agent. There’s that ‘profits’ column refusing to budge again. And all that before we even start talking about readers, who are famously intimidated by a thick spine. All this is to say that if your book can be shorter, it should be.
(I see you flash fiction writers, you guys are fine.)
If you’re writing commercial fiction, you want to be somewhere around the 70-80k sweet spot. A little over is fine, but we’re not aiming for fine, we’re aiming for as close to perfect as we can get. So cut it. If you’re heading towards 100k, cut it. If you’re over 100k, seriously, cut it. Science-fiction and fantasy writers, you guys have a bit more leeway, we know you need a bit of extra time to build a really immersive world without letting the reader feel like a world is being built for them. So you can feel free to add 20-25k to all the numbers above. Which means that – and I’m going to hold your hand when I say this, because I know what the average SFF first draft looks like – if your book is over 125k, cut it.
And to prove that I mean it it I’ll keep the ending to this post short.
Cut it.
Eli Keren is a literary agent and freelance editor. If you can’t bear to cut your book down, he can do it for you. Find him at www.elikeren.co.uk.
That's also really helpful for short stories and even for flash fiction. Thank you!
This is such a useful article. My WIP is currently around the 100k mark and heading towards 140k. These suggestions make cutting back seem manageable.