The edits for SAPPHIRE FLAMES have landed. The good news is that our editor liked the book. The bad news is that it’s 108,000 words and it needs to be closer to 100,000.
In the mixed-bag news, there are no obvious places to make a large cut. Typically, the easiest way to make large cuts is to drop a character or condense the plot, but in this case, everything that’s in there has to be in there. We are dropping Munoz, which is a small scene, but the rest will have to come from line edits. Meaning we will be checking for contractions and rewording things on a sentence level.
To quote Jeaniene Frost, who bravely suffered through the manuscript, “I marked some extra sentences through the middle of the book, but in the last quarter, you are screwed. There is nothing to cut.”
This is one of the simpler but more labor intensive edits. The only edit that’s more in depth is a voice edit, where the character doesn’t sound right. That one requires a complete rewrite. This one requires going through every sentence, trying to make it shorter.
You know that part when Arland talks about going into battle every day on Nexus, healing in the evening, and then going back out? It’s going to be a bit like that, because we have 2 weeks to accomplish this. So for the next two weeks, this blog will be a post-battle licking of the wounds. You have been warned.
Ooohh, can I have those 8000 words? ?
Me also pleaseeeee
Me too! Bring it on!
Please Please Please!? Can we keep the 8k for the ebook edition?
I know! Its like when Soliari told Mozart he had too many notes in his opera…
Just a suggestion, but are there any characters that we haven’t met yet that have longer names? One way might be to modify someone’s name to a shorter one—eg Sanders instead of Sanderson? It wouldn’t affect word count, but might shorten the existing words giving you some leeway (not 100% how it works) and could be accomplished with a find/change.
Or if they have multi-part names, maybe cut one part?
Good luck!
I wish we could just pay more for the extra words!
Good idea!
I wish we could have all the words, not just because that’s what you wrote and everyone agrees its whats needed but also because this sounds less like good editing processes to tighten things up but more like a seventh level of hell for you. I’m sorry.
And as a fan i want all the words. :/
I also want all the words. JS
But, if you have to cut a scene, can it be posted so we can read it? Lol
+1
While reading the extra words would not be a problem, it’s interesting that they need to be cut. I am wondering why. Maybe this is because too many words makes the physical book too large and it would be harder to produce?
And, congrats on almost being done! While a potentially time consuming and frustrating edit has emerged – it also sounds like your draft has been recognized as an excellent tale.
Wonder if they would let you cut from the paper book version and leave the words in in the e-book and audiobook version.
Or cut the prologue and leave an address to a post on this blog so that people can read it here.
I am excited to read the next part of the story and dying with anticipation.
This might be a stupid question. But why does it have to be 100000 and not 108000? Why does the exact length matter so much? I’m sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, or if it’s rude to ask, that wasn’t my intention. I hope someone can answer me. Please bear with me if my wording is off, as English is not my native language.
I am naive as to why the word count number matters. I can understand ‘seems to drag on in this section’ but just ‘too many words’ doesn’t make sense to be. As a member of your BDH more words == more yummy for me. Kind regards
Hey, guys – (Iben, Steph, and others)
Please check out the older comments. Ilona explains it there.
(I know. I’d love the longer version, too. Darn,)
But …. But …. Don’t they know that we want **all** the words ??
Nooooo. Don’t reduce the word count. We want ALL YOUR WORDS. Book company needs to print more pages,
Would you tell me why they would ask that you make a book shorter? Especially if story wise it works? I absolutely love long books and they seem to be very hard to find – I understand not adding filler just to make a long book but why deliberately force a shortened one?
Thank you Betty
In a previous life I wrote proposals. Several years ago we were working on a large proposal to the Government (yes, cap G) with a hard limit on page count. Since we were considerably over the limit we explored numerous options. One that was considered and actually attempted was splitting words using hyphens so that we could get a few more characters on each line. Microsoft has a feature that does something similar but at the time we were unaware of that capability. As a result we had a team of 8-10 highly paid consultants spending their time going through the massive document and adding hyphens to a word every line or two. Ultimately we found other ways to edit the document to reduce count and the consultants had to go back and manually remove thousands of hyphens. In retrospect, it was a pretty dum idea. My-advice-if-you-get-stuck-in-your-edits-is-to-try-using-hyphens-instead-of-spaces. That-way-you-have-a-few-very-long-words-rather-than-a-large-number-of-smaller-ones. When-the-editors-observe-your-creative-solution-they-may-cut-you-a-little-slack : )
Priceless view into capital G life!
Just curious why there is a word limit? Is it to keep book at certain price ( page printing)? Thank you, I love so many of your series.
Darn editors, we WANT, no we DEMAND those extra precious 8,000 words! If it makes the books or ebooks a tad more expensive, so be it. Perfection must not be tampered with!
I am not Anonymous!
When I have to cut words for a brief, I always search for “by” and “of” and see if there are ways to drop certain passive voice and prepositional phrases.
Good luck! Word count battles suck!