Dear A. Victoria Mixon, Editor:
Quick question (this one’s been plaguing me for years!)—
How much consideration do we writers put toward the length of each work? I’m currently refreshing my intensive outline (for a young adult serious fantasy saga). The more I work on this, the more I realize it will fit perfectly into two volumes. I was hoping for more. Why do I never see two-volume novels in this genre? Does it matter? Is it important enough that it be three or four parts for me to expand the plot-line and invent a third climax? Or is this something I shouldn’t be concerned about until the editing phase?
Thank you again and have a splendid day!
—Gen
Hoo, boy. Here’s the thing: publication is practiced these days not as a way to bring an art form to its audience, but as marketing, plain and simple. Rules work well in the marketing world. The more structure you can establish, the easier it is for potential buyers to know (and be conditioned for) what you have to sell, and the faster you can shovel stuff off shelves and money out of people’s pockets.
This is why there is so little leeway these days in What’s Done. (One of my favorite moments in Diana Tutton’s wonderful 1953 novel, Guard Your Daughters, is the sisters laughing at snobbery, “It isn’t done, it isn’t done!”)
Contemporary traditional publishing is just marketing, and that means rigid distinctions. And the reason this has been plaguing you for years is that the distinctions change over time, whenever either a marketer thinks up another way to categorize the bookshelves or a writer has the huevos to do really well something that wasn’t supposed to be Done at all.
Before the 1980s (see my tirade on how the publishing industry changed then), many of the genre distinctions of today didn’t even exist: MG vs. YA, mainstream vs. literary, experimental, or edgy, any kind of flash fiction.
The magical realism genre, pioneered by novels like John Crowley’s so-called “fantasy” Little, Big and the modern Native American stories of Louise Erdrich, would be baffling to today’s strict genre accountants.
And, so far as I know, even vampires were not really Done before Anne Rice interviewed that freaky guy in San Francisco.
So, yeah, if your goal is to appeal to the tunnel-vision marketers guarding the inner sanctum of publication these days, you’re probably better off plotting your fantasy series for three or more volumes. You can layer in a subplot to draw it out, but it does take restructuring for two distinct breaks in the story. This is the kind of thing I do in Developmental Editing. It’s actually a whole lot of fun so long as you don’t expect a quickie fix.
And even if you’re just trying to stay within the limits of possibility for an unknown author hoping to break into traditional publication, you have to decide whether you’re writing a novel (@70,000-100,000 words), an epic (up to @250,000 words, or whatever breaks the book’s spine), a series (upwards of 250,000 words, plotted specifically for separate volumes), or, on the shorter end, a novella (@30,000-70,000 words), a short story (@2,000-10,000 words), or flash fiction (anything just short). Recently Amazon has begun tackling the ridiculous bloating of novels that evolved over the past thirty years—up from the mid-twentieth-century average @40,000-65,000 words and due to a preponderance of hastily-written genre with a shocking lack of editing on the publishers’ part—by releasing what they call “Singles” (@10,000-30,000 words).
However, if your goal is simply to write a wonderful manuscript that tells your story in exactly the right words, exactly the way you want to tell it, then I wouldn’t worry. What doesn’t follow the current rules—if it’s well-conceived, well-written, and well-edited—is called trend-setting.
And, the next thing you know, everyone is doing it.