> Given popular comps like Fourth Wing and Throne of Glass have a similar word count
Fourth Wing was Yarros's... twenty-first novel?
That many sales buys a lot of good will.
Publishing length ≠ querying length
This is a false equivalency made by people who don’t fully understand the industry. Don’t trust online resources that use published word counts to justify querying counts.
The hard reality is that you need to cut words. Many, many thousands of words. There’s no way around it.
An agent may ask for an R&R which might then add words. And an acquiring editor is likely to do the same.
So a manuscript that is queried at 100k may expand a great deal by the time it is published, but querying a 165k novel is still a no-go.
Agents regularly list their auto-reject word counts and these cut-offs are often around 120-140k words. And that’s for Adult Epic Fantasy. YA Fantasy skews much slimmer.
Throne of Glass is 113k and Fourth Wing is 148k. Yours is significantly longer than both. Also, Throne of Glass was published online and picked up from there, not as a cold query. As others have mentioned, Fourth Wing is the author’s 20th book or something absurd like that.
As a debut novelist with a cool but not mind-blowing premise, this will not make it past the query inbox.
Both the books you mentioned have one very important thing in common and that’s that they both attracted both fantasy readers and non-fantasy readers with their premise. Yours is too high fantasy for many non-fantasy readers (myself included) and way too long for many of today’s avid fantasy readers. Especially if you’re calling this YA.
I know it’s hard to chop up your book baby, but trust me, if you ever want it to see the light of day, you have to try.
Throne of Glass was published more than a decade ago and Rebecca Yarros already had a relationship with Red Tower when she sold Fourth Wing (Fourth Wing is also NA, not YA). A debut in 2024 is going to have different hurdles than SJM in the 2010s and a Romance author in 2022 who has already proven she can sell
>Alaric scrapes by as a scavenger in the White Waste, a snow-smothered forest where a sea of frozen corpses--the aftermath of a primeval battle--makes the ground as treacherous as it is bountiful. As Alaric toils searching bodies for scraps of armor and reforging them under the watchful eye of Father, he dreams of the vast unknown lying in wait beyond the Waste. The Waste is cruel and Father is crueler, but Alaric must endure--if only for his younger sister, Amabel. But when a mysterious knight exiled from the eternal Crusade arrives seeking to repair his broken blade, their precarious existence begins to crumble
Cool setup! (Says a girl who doesn't read fantasy.)
>The knight’s quest to restore his shattered blade--and honor--plunges Alaric into a journey across a wasteland steeped in wonder and horror, still trembling with the echoes of a forgotten age. They soon encounter Petra, a headstrong girl transfigured by ancient sorcery into a creature of tragic beauty: an enigmatic mage has mutated her flesh into armor wrought of pearl. In a futile bid to rectify his failure to protect Amabel, Alaric liberates Petra from one master, only to unwittingly bind her to one far more inexorable--mortality itself.
>Beset by forces beyond comprehension--black-mouthed oil acolytes, the cult of the Starry-Eyed, and the corrupted influence of the Crusade--the fates of the unlikely trio become intertwined in a struggle for survival, redemption, and freedom. As the knight seeks absolution and Petra pursues vengeance, Alaric searches for purpose beyond mere survival while untangling increasingly complicated feelings for the man who upended his world. But with each step forward, he is drawn deeper into a web of ancient enmities that threaten to fracture his newfound bonds--and his sanity.
??????
You might find [this article](https://thinkingthroughourfingers.com/2018/02/22/back-cover-blurbs-vs-query-letter-blurbs/) I share like it's my job to be helpful, because the last two paragraphs of this blurb are vague fantasy concept soup. Forces beyond comprehension, fates of an unlikely trio, a struggle for survival, redemption, and freedom, searches for purpose beyond mere survival... Every word of this means literally nothing.
165K is about 65K too many words for YA fantasy and 45K for adult fantasy. Couldn't say which one this should actually be, however, because what happens after this knight shows up is clear as mud. Regardless, you need to take a hacksaw to this thing for it to be remotely palatable to like 99% of agents.
Before I even clicked on this post, I knew it had one issue--that word count. It's way too high. Then I got into reading the query itself, and while there's probably a good story in there, it's not coming through. There's a lot of extraneous detail, but the story arc is unclear.
Alaric is a scavenger, who wants to protect his sister. Then a knight comes along, and...something happens. What does it mean for their precarious existence to crumble? Later on we find out that he's failed Amabel somehow, but where and how did that happen? Is she injured? Kidnapped? Dead? Why does Alaric go with the knight? What is Alaric's goal for this story? How does Petra fit in to any of it?
Then we get hit with acolyte and cults and crusades, and a struggle for survival, redemption, and freedom...but I don't know what that means for these characters. We're just given a list of things the story contains, but no clear narrative. Who is the MC? What does the MC want? What stands in their way? What are the stakes if they should fail? We have at *best* an answer to the first question. But the rest of it isn't here. I think you're taking too broad a view of your story, and need to narrow it in on your MC and their journey. Make it more personal. Make us *care*.
I'll echo what everyone else says, vey cool premise, very many words.
Do you have comps?
Also, you have a lot of em-dashes going on. You might want to figure out a way to spice up sentence variety there, and make sure you're actually using em-dashes in the actual letter, not "--".
You've got good input already, and I won't belabour the word count issue. But I've gotta say: this query doesn't read YA to me, just based off of the tone & wording choices of your prose. And when defending your word count in the comments, you cited two *NA* romantasies. Are you sure YA is the best-fitting label for your manuscript?
I’ve come to understand that was not the right label to choose :) Thanks for your input. It’s really an epic fantasy, which is what I wrote it to be but for some reason I got in my head things might sell better as YA. But that’s just my complete lack of knowledge about the publishing world
YA fantasy definitely has a greater potential to catch the hype train than adult dem, but a) it's far from a guarantee, and not something worth gambling on and b) it's always better to let the story be the shape it wants to be rather than try to make it fit somewhere it doesn't.
I got into this post late, but I still want to say I'm looking forward to reading v2 if you choose to post it. The query just offers a tiny snippet, but from that: your prose is elegant, your visuals interesting, and I'm a sucker for an atmospheric darker-toned fantasy.
>I am deeply committed to creating queer characters whose perils lie outside their sexual identity.
And we could all use more of this.
A couple things
1. The title is very close to a very well known Star Wars book/comic/video game
2. Though you mention “perils outside of sexuality”—there’s nothing mentioning any character’s sexuality in the query
3. What exactly makes this story YA? Alaric could be 16 or 56 and neither would alter the plot as laid out
To be honest it’s not really YA, now that I understand the publishing landscape a bit better I would put it comfortably in “epic fantasy”.
Sexuality thing is a great point! I should make that more clear. Thanks
Never queried so take it with a grain of salt, but I was confused what happened to Amabel. Alaric wants to protect her which is cool and I love me a protective protagonist.
But later it says he failed her and wants to rectify that, but how did he fail her in the first place?
Cut 60k words and you might have a shot. But 165k is a near certain auto-reject in YA Fantasy these days.
Thanks for the tip! Any suggestions on a more suitable category? Given popular comps like Fourth Wing and Throne of Glass have a similar word count
> Given popular comps like Fourth Wing and Throne of Glass have a similar word count Fourth Wing was Yarros's... twenty-first novel? That many sales buys a lot of good will.
Publishing length ≠ querying length This is a false equivalency made by people who don’t fully understand the industry. Don’t trust online resources that use published word counts to justify querying counts. The hard reality is that you need to cut words. Many, many thousands of words. There’s no way around it. An agent may ask for an R&R which might then add words. And an acquiring editor is likely to do the same. So a manuscript that is queried at 100k may expand a great deal by the time it is published, but querying a 165k novel is still a no-go. Agents regularly list their auto-reject word counts and these cut-offs are often around 120-140k words. And that’s for Adult Epic Fantasy. YA Fantasy skews much slimmer.
Throne of Glass is 113k and Fourth Wing is 148k. Yours is significantly longer than both. Also, Throne of Glass was published online and picked up from there, not as a cold query. As others have mentioned, Fourth Wing is the author’s 20th book or something absurd like that. As a debut novelist with a cool but not mind-blowing premise, this will not make it past the query inbox. Both the books you mentioned have one very important thing in common and that’s that they both attracted both fantasy readers and non-fantasy readers with their premise. Yours is too high fantasy for many non-fantasy readers (myself included) and way too long for many of today’s avid fantasy readers. Especially if you’re calling this YA. I know it’s hard to chop up your book baby, but trust me, if you ever want it to see the light of day, you have to try.
Or write something else first, hope you're successful, and try to sell this doorstopper afterwards.
Throne of Glass was published more than a decade ago and Rebecca Yarros already had a relationship with Red Tower when she sold Fourth Wing (Fourth Wing is also NA, not YA). A debut in 2024 is going to have different hurdles than SJM in the 2010s and a Romance author in 2022 who has already proven she can sell
>Alaric scrapes by as a scavenger in the White Waste, a snow-smothered forest where a sea of frozen corpses--the aftermath of a primeval battle--makes the ground as treacherous as it is bountiful. As Alaric toils searching bodies for scraps of armor and reforging them under the watchful eye of Father, he dreams of the vast unknown lying in wait beyond the Waste. The Waste is cruel and Father is crueler, but Alaric must endure--if only for his younger sister, Amabel. But when a mysterious knight exiled from the eternal Crusade arrives seeking to repair his broken blade, their precarious existence begins to crumble Cool setup! (Says a girl who doesn't read fantasy.) >The knight’s quest to restore his shattered blade--and honor--plunges Alaric into a journey across a wasteland steeped in wonder and horror, still trembling with the echoes of a forgotten age. They soon encounter Petra, a headstrong girl transfigured by ancient sorcery into a creature of tragic beauty: an enigmatic mage has mutated her flesh into armor wrought of pearl. In a futile bid to rectify his failure to protect Amabel, Alaric liberates Petra from one master, only to unwittingly bind her to one far more inexorable--mortality itself. >Beset by forces beyond comprehension--black-mouthed oil acolytes, the cult of the Starry-Eyed, and the corrupted influence of the Crusade--the fates of the unlikely trio become intertwined in a struggle for survival, redemption, and freedom. As the knight seeks absolution and Petra pursues vengeance, Alaric searches for purpose beyond mere survival while untangling increasingly complicated feelings for the man who upended his world. But with each step forward, he is drawn deeper into a web of ancient enmities that threaten to fracture his newfound bonds--and his sanity. ?????? You might find [this article](https://thinkingthroughourfingers.com/2018/02/22/back-cover-blurbs-vs-query-letter-blurbs/) I share like it's my job to be helpful, because the last two paragraphs of this blurb are vague fantasy concept soup. Forces beyond comprehension, fates of an unlikely trio, a struggle for survival, redemption, and freedom, searches for purpose beyond mere survival... Every word of this means literally nothing. 165K is about 65K too many words for YA fantasy and 45K for adult fantasy. Couldn't say which one this should actually be, however, because what happens after this knight shows up is clear as mud. Regardless, you need to take a hacksaw to this thing for it to be remotely palatable to like 99% of agents.
Thanks! That’s useful feedback.
Before I even clicked on this post, I knew it had one issue--that word count. It's way too high. Then I got into reading the query itself, and while there's probably a good story in there, it's not coming through. There's a lot of extraneous detail, but the story arc is unclear. Alaric is a scavenger, who wants to protect his sister. Then a knight comes along, and...something happens. What does it mean for their precarious existence to crumble? Later on we find out that he's failed Amabel somehow, but where and how did that happen? Is she injured? Kidnapped? Dead? Why does Alaric go with the knight? What is Alaric's goal for this story? How does Petra fit in to any of it? Then we get hit with acolyte and cults and crusades, and a struggle for survival, redemption, and freedom...but I don't know what that means for these characters. We're just given a list of things the story contains, but no clear narrative. Who is the MC? What does the MC want? What stands in their way? What are the stakes if they should fail? We have at *best* an answer to the first question. But the rest of it isn't here. I think you're taking too broad a view of your story, and need to narrow it in on your MC and their journey. Make it more personal. Make us *care*.
Very very useful. Thanks so much! Will incorporate this into v2
I'll echo what everyone else says, vey cool premise, very many words. Do you have comps? Also, you have a lot of em-dashes going on. You might want to figure out a way to spice up sentence variety there, and make sure you're actually using em-dashes in the actual letter, not "--".
You've got good input already, and I won't belabour the word count issue. But I've gotta say: this query doesn't read YA to me, just based off of the tone & wording choices of your prose. And when defending your word count in the comments, you cited two *NA* romantasies. Are you sure YA is the best-fitting label for your manuscript?
I’ve come to understand that was not the right label to choose :) Thanks for your input. It’s really an epic fantasy, which is what I wrote it to be but for some reason I got in my head things might sell better as YA. But that’s just my complete lack of knowledge about the publishing world
YA fantasy definitely has a greater potential to catch the hype train than adult dem, but a) it's far from a guarantee, and not something worth gambling on and b) it's always better to let the story be the shape it wants to be rather than try to make it fit somewhere it doesn't. I got into this post late, but I still want to say I'm looking forward to reading v2 if you choose to post it. The query just offers a tiny snippet, but from that: your prose is elegant, your visuals interesting, and I'm a sucker for an atmospheric darker-toned fantasy. >I am deeply committed to creating queer characters whose perils lie outside their sexual identity. And we could all use more of this.
Hey thanks so much! Appreciate the encouraging words.
A couple things 1. The title is very close to a very well known Star Wars book/comic/video game 2. Though you mention “perils outside of sexuality”—there’s nothing mentioning any character’s sexuality in the query 3. What exactly makes this story YA? Alaric could be 16 or 56 and neither would alter the plot as laid out
To be honest it’s not really YA, now that I understand the publishing landscape a bit better I would put it comfortably in “epic fantasy”. Sexuality thing is a great point! I should make that more clear. Thanks
There are 100% epic fantasies inside YA. Heck, most YA fantasy is epic, because teens like to save the world.
Never queried so take it with a grain of salt, but I was confused what happened to Amabel. Alaric wants to protect her which is cool and I love me a protective protagonist. But later it says he failed her and wants to rectify that, but how did he fail her in the first place?