I found out about two fun sites for writers. The Guide to Grammar and Writing and the WordCounter. For the latter, I loaded in a first chapter and it told me which words were used most and how many times.
In an interview at Novelists Inc., Random House Senior Editor Shauna Summers says she works on primarily romance and women’s fiction.
FinePrint agent Colleen Lindsay lists general word counts for genres.
mainstream/commercial fiction/thrillers = Depending upon the kind of fiction, this can vary: chick lit runs anywhere from 80k word to 100k words; literary fiction can run as high as 120k but lately there’s been a trend toward more spare and elegant literary novels as short as 65k; thrillers also run in somewhere around the 100k to 120k mark; historical fiction can run as high as 160k words or more (and again, these are just rough guides – there are always exceptions). Anything under 50k is usually considered a novella, which isn’t something agents or editors ever want to see unless the editor has commissioned a short story collection. (Agent Kristin Nelson has a good post about writers querying about manuscripts that are too short.)
Dean Wesley Smith gives basic business rules for hiring and working with an agent.
“I am not against the standard writer/agent business model in publishing. I feel writers need good agents to help them through much of the early years. But for heaven’s sake, think like a business person when hiring an agent.”
J.A. Konrath says self-publishing ebooks on Kindle isn’t for everyone.
“If you have an out of print backlist. If you have an agent with books she hasn’t been able to sell. If you’re a published author with some shelf novels. Then yes, you should get on Kindle and iPad and Nook and Sony and everyplace else that comes up.
But if you’re a newbie author who hasn’t even finished your first novel yet and is already designing the cover art, perhaps you need to slow down a bit.”
Another interesting blog by JA Konrath on The Value of eBooks — but I have to add that it’s just his opinion. Some of the comments are as interesting as the blog. That goes for Dean Wesley Smith’s post, too.
