For the new year, I decided to expand the next batch of agents I’d query to represent my space opera novel. I’m excited to get this book out there; its themes of heroic scientific collaboration in the face of problems left by older generations and oligarchs seem awfully relevant these days. For no particular reason, I was querying about three agents at a time, and waiting for them all to respond (or for their typical response interval to elapse) before sending out the next batch. I’d done a few main batches, plus a few opportunistic queries to agents open for a limited time. They’ve almost all sent form rejections — only one felt like something customized — and almost all of them are a variation of “I just didn’t connect with the story.” This time, I thought, I would send out half a dozen queries at once. I found a few agents who looked like excellent matches. I was optimistic.

In their submission form, the last agent I queried finally gave me an indication that I might have something wrong with my strategy: my book is too long.

The novel comes in at about 181,000 words. In an attempt to search our extremely stupid and polluted information ecosystem for the length of a typical sci-fi novel, I turned up a large number of similarly named web sites with almost identical wording — strongly suspicious of chatbot slop pages — that all gave slightly different answers. The total range of answers is about 40,000 – 200,000 words (which mine fits in!), with an approximate most common answer of 80,000 – 150,000 (which it doesn’t, but isn’t too far outside). If that’s even useful information, given, you know, slop. The only hard cutoffs I have found are in award criteria, like the Nebula Award, which says a novella is 17,500 – 40,000 words and a novel is >40,000, with no upper limit.

To put this in perspective, I visited my bookshelf. In mass market paperback format (yes, yes, I know), my novel would be a bit over 600 pages. Long, but not out of family with many of the sci-fi and fantasy books on my shelf. It’s definitely an epic. I meant it to be. And compared to other SF epics, mine seems to be on the shorter side of the median. Peter F. Hamilton regularly turned out 800-plus-pagers. Ben Bova goes long. C. S. Friedman’s (awesome) debut novel, In Conquest Born, is 590 pages. It sure seemed like my length would be acceptable relative to comparable stuff.

Through a friend-of-a-friend connection to a well-regarded, established author, I finally got the piece of information I was missing: agents have a difficult time selling debut novels over about 100,000 words to publishers in the current market. The problem isn’t that my novel is over 100, it’s that it’s over 100 and it’s my first and today is different than when Friedman started. Even if my story does grab an agent’s attention, the agent’s job is then to sell it, and the buyers won’t be buying.

Well, darn. If I had known that, rather than continuing to operate under the impression that everybody gets rejected a bunch and eventually I would get this in front of someone who gravitated toward my concept, I wouldn’t have kept cluttering up agents’ inboxes and wasting everybody’s time. Anyway, now I know: I probably have a (for now) unsellable book that I am trying to get out into the wild. I spent yesterday kicking myself that I only realized this just after sending out a new batch of queries, so I’ve accidentally scratched off a half dozen promising agents for this project. I will let those stand; my understanding is that if I retract them, it would be a faux pas to submit the same novel again, even reworked.

So, what am I going to do now?

First option to consider: darlingcide. Can I cut subplots out of my epic, focus it in, and get to the target length?

I don’t think that works. I identified some scenes and subplots I could delete. But this would change the way the story works — instead of seeing a pivotal character’s evolution, readers would just see them pop in for an occasional apparent deus ex machina action to move the plot along. It would lose immersion and scope. But most importantly: I could probably get the book down to 150,000 words this way, if I worked hard at it. But under 100,000? No, that would have to be something structured entirely differently. My barometer here is the feedback I’ve received: my test readers have all given me positive feedback, nobody says the book bogged down in any particular place, and nobody says it felt too long. While I could try to cut it, I would have to approach the story completely differently than it is now and I would end up with a completely different project on my hands, one that would necessarily strike readers very differently. I’m not really interested in messing with success.

Next option: Fortuitously, I structured my book with an explicit division — Part 1 and Part 2. When I was plotting the novel out, it divided neatly that way in my head. Part 1 ends on a cliffhanger, and in terms of word count, would be in the 80,000s. This puts the second part in the 90,000s. In terms of size, that’s perfect.

I wrote it as a single, standalone story. That was just my preference for how it felt to me (both to write and to read). But I have no objection to dividing it into two volumes. What I’m unsure about it whether this is more saleable to publishers or not. They want debut SF authors to come in under 100,000 words. Is it harder to sell a book with a cliffhanger ending? Is it easier to sell that, knowing that the follow-up is already written? Is it harder to sell the sequel, given that it doesn’t stand on its own without the first part? I don’t know these answers. That is market analysis that’s opaque to me. Clearly, I need an agent!

What this does, though, is give me an approach. I can rewrite my query letter for just the first part, 80,000-something words, and state that I have the second ready to go. I can reformulate my synopsis to focus on the first part, and have a closing final paragraph to say “in the conclusion, which is already written, these broad strokes will occur.”

Then I need to find a bunch of new agents to query. And maybe one of my half-dozen outstanding new queries will come back, and ask me if my story splits in two!

I just have to come up with a new title for that first part. “A More Glorious Dawn” will go better with Part 2.