I just cut out a mighty chunk of 3,000 words. I think it takes away from the story some, but sacrifices will have to be made to get my word count down.
The reason I’m going through the effort is twofold.
First, it’s good to go through and remove whatever seems unneeded. Maybe it’s a bit of dialogue that is serving no purpose, maybe it’s a description of a character that appears in all of one paragraph, maybe it’s an action sequence that’s only there because I feel like it’s been awhile since since there’s been action, but some stuff just has to go.
Second, there’s the getting published aspect. Publishers aren’t interested in long books from unknown authors. It’s understandable really, they’re betting the production costs of the book that it’ll make money. With a first-time author the bet is probably not going to pay off, so why risk more money?
Now a lot of popular fantasy books are big, fat ones that you see eating up space on the bookshelf. But these books are from established authors or were published back when the rules where a bit different. When I started working on a book, I didn’t research any of this, so it never occurred to me that I couldn’t write a 180,000 word book and realistically submit it. The fantasy I grew up on had longer books than that, and if they weren’t, often it was book one of a series and didn’t really come to an end in that first book.
Anyhow, I know better now, and I’m shooting for 120,000 words. I’m just under 140,000 words now and dropping more words all the time.
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