Today I open up my WIP for the first time in 2 weeks and I am ready to keep going on it. Plotwise, I have written somewhere between 45% and 50% of the story. It is an action comedy for YA (14-20 age range) - a stand alone story with the potential to expand into additional stories afterward. Problem: I only have 23k words. Man, this story I feel is my most promising effort so far in terms of one day being published, but I am estimating only 50-55k words upon completion. I look at some things on this site and they say that at least 60k words are needed for this type of story, and then other sources say that publishers expect even more words than that for a first time author. I dunno. How can I be expected to pump out so many words when the story is designed to be fast-paced and to the point? Is it okay to have such a word count for this target audience?
It's hard to say. Action-comedy based stories risk being redundant if they're too long. If you're trying to bolster your word count, I'd say try and detail the action sequences as much as possible. Not outlining every fragment of each grenade detonation (if you will) but enough to really get a deep sense about what is going on and afterwords, the comedy elements should bring levity to the entire situation and allow the readers to take a breath and enjoy some peaceful settings. I'm not sure how the requirements fit into the comedy genre but if you tell a good story and get some laughs out of it, I'm sure there's one publisher out there who would love to hear it.
Its YA doesn't have to be as long as an adult novel especially if it is aimed at the younger end of 14-20. Is it young enough to be seen as junior fiction like the Hardy Boys etc ?
