So You’re Thinking About Querying a Book Outside Industry Standard Lengths by Jessica Aragon

The first thing I’ll say to you is:
Don’t.

Here’s the graphic I’ve seen agents post most frequently. For normal people, these are good guidelines: 

Via Writer’s Digest

(Quick disclaimer: this post is mainly for the over-writers among us. You’d have to ask someone who is not me about querying a very short manuscript.)

For Adult SFF word count is a little more flexible, but after 120k you’re facing an uphill battle. After 200k, well… 

via GIPHY

This advice is there for a reason. Many (though not all!) writers with a high word count have not yet learned how to edit. Agents are busy people, and if you give them an easy reason to reject you, 9/10 times they will. As a querying writer, you’re unproven. It will be assumed you’re making rookie mistakes, even if you aren’t.

Is this fair? Hell no. That wizard lady is out here inflicting her 500k transphobic screeds on the world, and it’s debut authors with word counts over 120k who are the problem? Please.

It’s stupid and unfair. But it still IS, and we’ve gotta deal with it :/

via GIPHY

There’s always SOMEBODY, though, insisting THEY will be the exception to the rule. THEIR book is different. They are prepared to SUFFER for their art.

I was that person. 

My “final” draft of the book that got me my agent—my third foray into the query trenches—ended up at almost 200k, and when I tell you I did EVERYTHING I could think of to make it shorter… 

I shot off my first batch of queries at 178k. That is not a typo. A hundred and seventy-eight thousand words of unhinged space opera chaos, crash-landing into the inboxes and QueryManagers of 70 literary agents, in the post-pandemic publishing hellscape of 2021-2022.

via GIPHY

So if you’re getting ready to query a chonky MS, I’m going to tell you again: Don’t.

You will get hurt. You could be the greatest writer in the world and nobody will care, because you had to go and ignore one of the most basic guidelines of querying. Save the epic for when you’re an established author, and focus on making your next WIP nice and succinct.

Seriously. This is for your own good.

Still here? Still want to query on nightmare hard mode?

ARE YOU SURE?

Okay.

Let me tell you what my dumb ass did.

1. Revise that book to within an inch of its life. Here are some of my favorite tips for cutting words:

• Approach it chapter by chapter, or even page by page. Cutting 30 words per page isn’t quite as daunting as cutting 30k.

• Look at dialogue. In real life, people use a lot of small talk and filler that bleeds over into most people’s writing, but doesn’t actually need to be there. Get rid of unnecessary tags and break up your dialogue with actions. I have cut thousands and thousands of words just by streamlining my dialogue.

• Nothing is “too small” to cut. Look for unnecessary “that’s” and “had’s” and “just’s”, passive voice and filter words. Over a 200k manuscript, it adds up.

• Make sure every scene is doing more than one job (characterization, plot advancement, worldbuilding, etc). Ask yourself what the objective of each scene is, and if it’s not pulling its weight in MORE THAN ONE WAY, either cut it or combine it with another scene. “All vibes, no plot” kind of writing is not for you. Sorry.

• Save everything you cut. It’s easier to kill those darlings if you don’t view them as necessarily “dead”—just, idk, hibernating. It’s very possible that once you have an editor, depending on their feedback, you’ll need them again!

• This will sound silly, but it’s worked for me: treat every line like it’s a snippet you’re sharing on social media. You have a character limit, and also everyone will judge you if it isn’t a flawless model of efficient prose (they won’t, but you know what I mean). 

If you’re done revising—and by “done”, I mean you’ve run this past beta readers and CPs who aren’t emotionally invested in giving you praise—and your book is STILL an absolute unit… my condolences. 

via GIPHY

Here’s what you can do next:

1. Be selective about who you query. If you have QueryTracker, it has a feature where you can look at an agent’s request history by word count. There is a non-zero number who will look at doorstoppers (I wouldn’t go further back than 2020, because unfortunately the industry has evolved since then). Brand new agents are more of a gamble, but might be willing to take a bigger risk on a book they feel strongly about.

2. Mentally prepare for what you’re getting into. I got many prompt rejections (like, within minutes) saying “I’ll take a look if you get this below 130k” or “anything over 140k is an automatic no from me.” My ghost rate was in the stratosphere, and my final request rate was a staggering 15%. Half my post-offer nudges ghosted me, too. You have to know from the start that you’ll be judged by a categorically different metric than someone querying a book at, say, 90k. Let me repeat this for emphasis: YOU WILL BE JUDGED BY A CATEGORICALLY DIFFERENT METRIC THAN SOMEONE QUERYING A BOOK WITHIN INDUSTRY STANDARD LENGTHS.

3. On that subject: You’re not going to be a unicorn. That person with the 60% request rate, who won’t stop vague-tweeting all over your feed, who ends up with eleventeen offers of rep within a month of querying? Not going to be you. Best to rip that band-aid off now.

(Quick aside on “unicorns”: If you’re ever feeling down about yourself, playing that comparison game we writers love, pay attention to genre/category. As an adult sci-fi writer, I had a MUCH smaller field to query than my friends writing, for example, YA Contemporary. A microscopic request rate is much more normal in some genres/categories—it doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer.)

1. It sucks (SUCKS!!!) to have to query for many many years, but experience does pay off. I got requests from agents I’m pretty sure wouldn’t have given me the time of day otherwise, because they were familiar with my work and knew I could produce a tightly-written manuscript. If you’re unlucky enough to be a querying veteran, target agents who have asked to see more work from you.

2. If you’re fortunate enough to get personalized feedback—sadly, NOT a guarantee these days—pay attention. I knew I was on the right track because, of the agents who actually read my full MS and commented on it, not ONE criticized the length. If I’d gotten feedback telling me the book dragged, it would have been a different story.

3. Get lucky. This is the hardest truth in publishing: It’s not a meritocracy. There is no life-changing advice that will GUARANTEE YOU AN AGENT IF YOU FOLLOW THESE SIMPLE STEPS! You could be doing everything right and it still won’t work out because PUBLISHING. IS. NOT. A. MERITOCRACY. It’s not you—it’s the system.

4. If you get an offer, congratulations! But your suffering isn’t over. Be prepared to make that book even shorter. My agent agreed that my book didn’t “feel” long—it earned every one of its pages. She still straight up told me she put off reading my full because the length was so daunting, and when she finally opened it up she did so preparing to reject. She also wouldn’t send it on sub until I got it down to 150k. I had to cut a lot of good scenes, scenes I still believe made the book stronger, to give it its best chance of selling. If that sounds paradoxical… welcome to trad pub.

5. Work on something new. Something NOT a sequel, preferably of a more normal length. You’ve probably heard this before, but it’s evergreen advice regardless of where you are in your journey. 

6. Be nice to yourself. It’s rough out there.

via GIPHY

I’m going to wrap this up now, because it’s getting long. I am nothing if not on brand.

If you’re querying an irresponsibly long MS, godspeed! Now that I got all the pessimism out of the way, I wish you success. Every writer needs a certain amount of unhinged, bordering-on-delusional belief in themselves to try to get published in the first place; you just might need a little more than most. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s impossible, and querying is a giant gamble anyway.