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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2566007" data-attributes="member: 5171">For the record -- the numbers I stated before are accurate, as far as I know, for new writers submitting stuff. That is to say, if your fantasy novel is 300k words, it's gonna be a tougher sell than if it were 125k. I'm not saying that your 300k-word novel isn't good enough, but statistically, most aren't, at this point in the publishing timeline. Publishers would rather split up books that are that big.As far as cutting and trimming go -- don't do it yet. Get all the story out there, then see what doesn't work or isn't necessary. It's easier to see where the ten percent ought to be cut once the whole hundred percent is there.And JD is right -- they do all kinds of tricks to get a book look like the size they'd like it to be. Easiest way to find out is to pick up the book in question, count the number of words on a given page, and then multiply by the number of actual text pages (ie, not counting the title page and such). If you want to be even more accurate, you can cut one page's worth of words for each chapter, since most books start the text of a chapter halfway down the page, and a chapter might end with just a bit on the page or with almost a full page of text, so rounding to halfway is about right. (Thus, in each chapter, you lose about one page's worth of words.)</blockquote>