So I started up the laser printer and began printing, then noticed - with double-spacing - that it will be a grand total of 700 pages!! Gaaaaa. I may have to send this in a box!
Submission length is measured by word count, not pages. But if you are talking about the difficulty of submitting a hardopy manuscript when a query has yielded a full manuscript request, well, it comes with the territory. Instead, rejoice that you have achieved that level of interest!
700 pages?! Yeesh. This is why I'm pitching to the email friendly crowd in this round of submissions. Gratz though on garnering enough interest to warrant a full manuscript.
if it's 700 pages, in standard ms format, that would be around 175k, which is about two times the acceptable size for an adult market novel by a new writer [most publishers want 80-100k]... whatever the size, a full ms would still need to be sent in a box... that's just the norm... and, as cog noted, is an unavoidable hassle/expense for writers... did an agent or publisher actually ask you to send them such an oversized ms?... and how come you couldn't tell how many pages the ms consisted of till you started to print it?... didn't you ever look at the page number in the header, as you were writing?...
Actually, no interest... yet! Hopeful like everyone though. I just thought I should print it up. And I actually started this thread before I saw the 'Word Count' thread in General Writing. At 200,000 words I think I need to pare it down some...:redface:
Oh God yes... 200k is far too long. And aside from that, given the expense of printing a whole novel, I'd probably wait until a publisher has requested the full manuscript before you print it.
I bet you could edit that 200K down to about half that, and probably have a better novel as well. I haven't seen your writing style, but most of what I have seen of new writers, their manuscripts tend to be overly wordy. I know I always end up with far fewer words after editing, without losing anything that didn't NEED to be lost. It's especially important for an unknown writer to stay within the publisher's word count range. After you're established as profitable, publishers will grant you more leeway. And that's not always a good thing, when veteran cash cows like Stephen King write bloated behemoths like Under the Dome.
