Seeking opinions

Welcome!

Without knowing you writing/story, all I can do is advise you what I tell a lot of people:

If you're seeking publishing, you might want to console all your ideas into a single book. Pack everything in as much as possible, while meeting your genre's average word count. This is the idea of hitting the market with a strong debut, rather than a rumbling series (which you typically only publish one book at a time, so that's your debut, but it might be better to pack more story in, then to cut it apart and spread it into other books).

If you want to do two books, they would have to be stand alone stories. Two different books, not telling the same story (can be spanning the same overreaching story, like the main villain wasn't killed in the first but whatever he was doing was stopped). If you wrote one long story and cut it, you wouldn't be writing two books, but two volumes of a single book. There are only very rare cases of this like ASOIAF--which George R.R. Martin was already well into the publishing industry and knew what he was doing to actually do it correctly.

I also have to question if that "long" story could be cut down in both writing and what occurs (boiling things down) to make it just a average length story. I've seen a lot of stories from newbies (like you, at the moment), with 300K words, and cut them down to 80K telling the same story.


Methinks, one story and cut down as much as possible.

Hi Cindy,

I had a similar problem and was told that one very strong novel is better than two or three with the "dazzle" (my words not theirs) spread out across them. For my attempt at first novel I had submitted it as book one of a trilogy. I was lucky enough to get it accepted but when I gave the full rundown of the arc to my editor (which had grown and taken turns as you said whilst I was writing it) I was asked instead to condense it all in to one book and write a second set in the same world, maybe with one of the other characters from the "first" and their own story.

It was explained to me that it's better for people to come back to your books for your voice as an author; not to see what happens to one character.

I don't know if this is exactly the problem you are facing but it does seem like I was in your position and I pushed on with every knew twist instead of focusing on which parts of my novel were strongest. Perhaps you could re-evaluate how many of the extra ideas are really necessary/will be enjoyed and decide from there.

Good luck with it all and I hope that helps a bit.

EDIT- WillSauger seems to have smacked the nail well on the head before I hit send. That's the gist of what my editor asked of me and the newbie trait he mentioned was mine as well. I saw the total thing as being about 300k (as a trilogy) and now I am working my way through revision and boiling it all down it'll probably be 100. I think Will may be Yoda...

Welcome. It depends on how long the book is. For first novels, you should usually try to stay under 100,000 words. You can as long as 120,000 or so for epic fantasy and space opera.

Also, by part one, two, and three, do you mean that each part doesn't stand alone? If that's the case, you might have trouble getting published.

Welcome to AW!

Welcome to AW and good luck with your problem.

I completely agree with Will.

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Cindy,

Welcome to AW! Everyone has given you good, sound advice. Let me view your situation from a different prospective. As a new author, any book over 100K words will be a hard sell however a short, quality book will yield the same income as a long quality book. The math is simple. Two short books (80-100K) will bring in twice the income as one long book.

hi Cindy and welcome to the cooler. glad to have you here