while that may be true, the point is that one must mention the word count in the query letter, which is what presents the novel in a way that one hopes will make the agent want to take it on... and, since most agencies get piles of queries daily, the person first reading yours will be looking for reasons to toss it and leave a minimum of queries to deal with... one of the most common of those reasons is a too long or too short word count... so, to maximize your novel's chances of having the query read by the agent, in order to interest her/him in the book, keeping the size to the most-preferred 80-100 k will do that... why minimize it's chances by not doing so?...
