I should start by wishing everyone a Happy New Year! I haven’t been blogging much for a while, which is mainly because of a holiday where I had some trouble gaining access to the Internet (only my Blackberry), but also just really busy with editing work for IFWG Publishing. Things are going well on that front.
I finished before New Year editing The Wicked Heroine, by Jasmine Giacomo – a truly excellent writer and a great fantasy novel. What sparked me to make a big decision was the fact that the novel was about 120k in length, and was part 2 of a duology. Now, I haven’t actually asked the question of her whether she originally wrote a larger work, and chose to split it, but her decision was right regardless. If there was a single universal truth about the publishing business, it would be that publishers (and consequently agents) simply don’t want to publish large tomes. Refer to this link that describes it succinctly.
So I got thinking. I always knew that my first novel, The Sceptre and the Orb, had an uphill battle, because it was 200k in length. Industry looks toward about 100k, and for fantasy, due to world building, up to about 140k. I got figuring that I needed to cut my novel into two, and do a duology, like Jasmine.
Of course, things aren’t that simple, especially if I am restructuring on the fly. I found that the obvious split point was 120k into my novel, leaving a small 80k for the second. This isn’t good. So I need to think about expanding my second half, without making it waffle.
This is my challenge. The consequence of a big decision.
The Chronicles of Evyntyde 