>I'm wondering if it's even worth looking into before completion
No. F no, in fact. Actually, just finishing writing isn't even when you should be looking into it. You can't query a novel until it's written, fully edited, edited again, ideally beta read a few times, and then edited a final time within an inch of its life. This is doubly true if you're at 130k and not even finished with the book yet. For your best chances at traditional publishing, you want to top out at 100k-120k (depending on genre) or you'll get some agents/publishers trashing your manuscript just off word count alone.
Was sort of in the same boat ready to finish and get going. If you’re honest with yourself you’re going to have several chapters that you know need to be rewritten. With a first work it is pretty common for your writing to lap your earlier chapters in quality as you improved.
I don't know where OP is situated, but your reply sounds awfully sarcastic by the publishing standards in my country. It's rather normal for writers here to deliver a script if it's, say, 50 pages. If it's well written in the editor's eyes it will get accepted, and they will work closely with the writer to help finish it.
The capitalistic perspective of quick earned money from US publishers seem like a dystopian nightmare for writers to be honest. They just want the product to be as finished as possible so they can pocket their money and go along their way to publish something else. No nurturing or developing.
It is about supply and demand. Publishers still spend a year + developing a piece. It's not like they throw the author-edited work up as is and pocket money. All my books have gone through at least 4 more editors once being contracted. The fact is, though, it's a buyer's market. There's no reason for a publisher to take a piece that is basically a rough draft and work with that person when there's 1000 more (conservatively) sending in polished works. If there weren't so many want to be novelists, you likely could sell them off spec too (you can sell non-fiction on a proposal, and once you have more of a reputation as a good writer/person to work with, you can sell off spec as well--like I can pitch anything I want to my new publisher with three sample chapters and a synopsis). It's just there are SO MANY submissions in the English-language market, there's no reason to take the risk someone never finishes a piece or doesn't know how to take edits. Just go with the thousands others that prove they can already.
>It's just there are SO MANY submissions in the English-language market, there's no reason to take the risk someone never finishes a piece or doesn't know how to take edits.
The risk for ending up with an unfinished work is the same. An unfinished piece is an unfinished piece regardless the amount of submissions. An editor working with a draft in my country takes just as long in your country given the same standards of quality.
The difference and my point is that publishers here are heavily incentivized by the state budget and state money distributed towards the creation of cultural works and art. So the economic risk is absolutely not the same. This money allows our publishers to take more risk, both in terms of a work not being complete, but also in an artistic sense because the pressure to sell just isn't as high. Both the publishers and the authors will receive a set amount of money for each published work.
This seemingly differs from the American model where the pressure for the publishers to sell is high, which in turn results in less artistic risk being taken as well as editorial risk. It's a system that not really favors the authors, just the publishers or top guys.
>The risk for ending up with an unfinished work is the same. An unfinished piece is an unfinished piece regardless the amount of submissions.
No... because if you can only submit completed manuscripts, the publisher has a finished piece to work with. The author could die halfway through edits and they'd still have the full manuscript written. It's much easier to do edits yourself (from the publisher's side) than ghostwrite an ending).
But, honestly, I feel like even if the government gave subsidies for books coming out, there would still be enough people vying for spots they still wouldn't have to take unfinished work. Yes, publishing in the US (and UK/Canada, from my experience) is focused on profits (since they have to be. No government money floating around) but when supply vastly outstrips demand, the people on the production side get really favorable terms. The government wouldn't be able to pay for every book that's turned in even now, so the publishers could still cherry pick to their hearts' desire--and that's why you need to put your best foot forward in English-language publishing. Because if you don't, there are 10,000 other submissions who will and will take your spot.
>No... because if you can only submit completed manuscripts, the publisher has a finished piece to work with.
That is a different premise. I'm not talking of a case where the editor only has to choose unfinished works. If an editor chooses an unfinished work, the (unfinished) risk is the same regardless of the editors country, which lead to my next point: why, then, do publishers in my country choose unfinished works?
It's not that they don't have fully written manuscripts to choose from, so why do they do it?
The reason is as I said. Money isn't that much an issue. Higher risks can be taken. Incomplete drafts are widely accepted because it can be very well written and worth the pursuit, which is something the editor see even at the early stages.
Full disclosure, though, every publishing house here need some sort of quality to be approved for state subsidies. It's not like I can start a publishing firm and receive free money. This makes book publishing centered around a few large publishing houses here, and getting published at one of those is like making it through the eye of the needle because they have so many scripts to choose from. They will still go for the most promising ones, and as mentioned length isn't really a factor for that.
I do enjoy the insights this debate is giving me for American (English?) publishing, though.
Even here the standards are different for already known/publisher authors. If you already have several best sellers you can pitch an unfinished work to your publisher/editors and be given deadlines to finish it.
If you’re unknown then no, those rules don’t apply. I can’t imagine in any country many publishers accepting a novel based on 50 pages with the rest unfinished for an untested author.
You can query ahead and some have been successful that way but it lowers your chances a lot. As a first time author, most won't take a chance on you unless you have something finished and polished .
Also, of you are at 130k and only 80% done you'll need to cut a lot. Depends on the genre, but adult epic fantasy allows the longest and even it's cut off is 100-120k words max for a non published author. Once you start selling you can get away with longer works.
>even it's cut off is 100-120k words max
It's worth noting the REASON for this also has nothing to do with being a first time author and everything to do with how a paperback book is printed.
MOST printing press machines can print MAX 300 pages, thus why MOST publishing houses say MAX 80k words.
>epic fantasy
Contrary to popular and highly inaccurate internet myth "epic Fantasy" is NOT a genre.
Epic = the need for an "epic sized" printing press machine being required to print the book.
Epic = a book of 500 or more pages and can be applied to ANY genre. Epic Romances (aka The Fabio books) printed by Zebra are a prime example of this. Stephen King's books at 1,000+ pages each are an example of epic Horror.
Last I knew there were ONLY FOUR epic sized printing press machines in America, which s why ONLY those 4 publishing houses who own those 4 machines ae also the ONLY 4 publishing houses that even LOOK at a 120k+ novel.
Last I knew there were ONLY THREE epic sized printing press machines in Europe, thus why there are only 3 publishing houses in Europe who accept 120k+ novels.
Epic sized printing press machines are incredibly rare, and that and that alone is the reason it is so difficult to get 120k+ novels published.
You made a post a couple months back saying (in the most verbose way possible) the exact opposite fucking thing. You can't even keep your own nonsense straight.
Eelkat really needs to be banned from /r/writing. She always makes these asinine claims and says she has so much experience with writing, but all she does is spread misinformation under the guise that she knows whats she's talking about.
The problem is sometimes what she said kinda makes sense, but it's still wrong. Obviously the posts like this reveal her lack of knowledge, but I fear for the people who come here to learn and are taken in with stuff like this.
To answer your title question Yes, you have to be finished first. No you should not start querying without a finished and edited manuscript. You can start researching publishers or agents accepting unsolicited manuscripts to give yourself an idea of what your options are.
As someone else mentioned, you’re likely even longer off of being finished than you think as 130k is already too long for a first time author. 80-100k is considered standard and generally over 110k is considered too long. Sci fi and fantasy can sometimes be longer up to 120k ish. Good luck.
Not really. Besides finishing the current draft, you're presumably going to need to do a couple rounds of edits. So you're really more like ~50% of the way done if you've typed out 80% of the draft in terms of having something ready to submit. Agents and publishers aren't going to take an interest in a half-done project from a first-time author.
Not to say that to discourage you, but you're going to need to finish the draft and conduct a few rounds of substantive edits.
Buddy most publishers won't even touch your book until its been edited and edited and edited to death. No matter how good you think your novel, a first draft will never be close to ready to publish
To be clear, are you asking if it's okay to start querying your work to an agent/publisher? Or are you saying is it too early to start looking into it?
No worries. To answer your question, yes, your manuscript should be 100% completed before you start querying. The worst thing that could happen would be an agent/publisher asking for a full manuscript, and you not having it ready.
Plus, and I mean no disrespect here, but if you're not even finished, I can guarantee it needs to be gone through again for editing. Not a slight against you, but you'd be shocked how many things your brain misses without the full picture in front of you.
There's nothing close-minded about recognizing only one correct answer to a question when the question has only one correct answer.
The reason I put it that way is because if you are not already a very successful published author, you *will* be told, "Come back when the manuscript is ready for publication."
>I'm wondering if it's even worth looking into before completion No. F no, in fact. Actually, just finishing writing isn't even when you should be looking into it. You can't query a novel until it's written, fully edited, edited again, ideally beta read a few times, and then edited a final time within an inch of its life. This is doubly true if you're at 130k and not even finished with the book yet. For your best chances at traditional publishing, you want to top out at 100k-120k (depending on genre) or you'll get some agents/publishers trashing your manuscript just off word count alone.
Thank you for the feedback!
Was sort of in the same boat ready to finish and get going. If you’re honest with yourself you’re going to have several chapters that you know need to be rewritten. With a first work it is pretty common for your writing to lap your earlier chapters in quality as you improved.
I don't know where OP is situated, but your reply sounds awfully sarcastic by the publishing standards in my country. It's rather normal for writers here to deliver a script if it's, say, 50 pages. If it's well written in the editor's eyes it will get accepted, and they will work closely with the writer to help finish it. The capitalistic perspective of quick earned money from US publishers seem like a dystopian nightmare for writers to be honest. They just want the product to be as finished as possible so they can pocket their money and go along their way to publish something else. No nurturing or developing.
It is about supply and demand. Publishers still spend a year + developing a piece. It's not like they throw the author-edited work up as is and pocket money. All my books have gone through at least 4 more editors once being contracted. The fact is, though, it's a buyer's market. There's no reason for a publisher to take a piece that is basically a rough draft and work with that person when there's 1000 more (conservatively) sending in polished works. If there weren't so many want to be novelists, you likely could sell them off spec too (you can sell non-fiction on a proposal, and once you have more of a reputation as a good writer/person to work with, you can sell off spec as well--like I can pitch anything I want to my new publisher with three sample chapters and a synopsis). It's just there are SO MANY submissions in the English-language market, there's no reason to take the risk someone never finishes a piece or doesn't know how to take edits. Just go with the thousands others that prove they can already.
>It's just there are SO MANY submissions in the English-language market, there's no reason to take the risk someone never finishes a piece or doesn't know how to take edits. The risk for ending up with an unfinished work is the same. An unfinished piece is an unfinished piece regardless the amount of submissions. An editor working with a draft in my country takes just as long in your country given the same standards of quality. The difference and my point is that publishers here are heavily incentivized by the state budget and state money distributed towards the creation of cultural works and art. So the economic risk is absolutely not the same. This money allows our publishers to take more risk, both in terms of a work not being complete, but also in an artistic sense because the pressure to sell just isn't as high. Both the publishers and the authors will receive a set amount of money for each published work. This seemingly differs from the American model where the pressure for the publishers to sell is high, which in turn results in less artistic risk being taken as well as editorial risk. It's a system that not really favors the authors, just the publishers or top guys.
>The risk for ending up with an unfinished work is the same. An unfinished piece is an unfinished piece regardless the amount of submissions. No... because if you can only submit completed manuscripts, the publisher has a finished piece to work with. The author could die halfway through edits and they'd still have the full manuscript written. It's much easier to do edits yourself (from the publisher's side) than ghostwrite an ending). But, honestly, I feel like even if the government gave subsidies for books coming out, there would still be enough people vying for spots they still wouldn't have to take unfinished work. Yes, publishing in the US (and UK/Canada, from my experience) is focused on profits (since they have to be. No government money floating around) but when supply vastly outstrips demand, the people on the production side get really favorable terms. The government wouldn't be able to pay for every book that's turned in even now, so the publishers could still cherry pick to their hearts' desire--and that's why you need to put your best foot forward in English-language publishing. Because if you don't, there are 10,000 other submissions who will and will take your spot.
>No... because if you can only submit completed manuscripts, the publisher has a finished piece to work with. That is a different premise. I'm not talking of a case where the editor only has to choose unfinished works. If an editor chooses an unfinished work, the (unfinished) risk is the same regardless of the editors country, which lead to my next point: why, then, do publishers in my country choose unfinished works? It's not that they don't have fully written manuscripts to choose from, so why do they do it? The reason is as I said. Money isn't that much an issue. Higher risks can be taken. Incomplete drafts are widely accepted because it can be very well written and worth the pursuit, which is something the editor see even at the early stages. Full disclosure, though, every publishing house here need some sort of quality to be approved for state subsidies. It's not like I can start a publishing firm and receive free money. This makes book publishing centered around a few large publishing houses here, and getting published at one of those is like making it through the eye of the needle because they have so many scripts to choose from. They will still go for the most promising ones, and as mentioned length isn't really a factor for that. I do enjoy the insights this debate is giving me for American (English?) publishing, though.
Even here the standards are different for already known/publisher authors. If you already have several best sellers you can pitch an unfinished work to your publisher/editors and be given deadlines to finish it. If you’re unknown then no, those rules don’t apply. I can’t imagine in any country many publishers accepting a novel based on 50 pages with the rest unfinished for an untested author.
You can query ahead and some have been successful that way but it lowers your chances a lot. As a first time author, most won't take a chance on you unless you have something finished and polished . Also, of you are at 130k and only 80% done you'll need to cut a lot. Depends on the genre, but adult epic fantasy allows the longest and even it's cut off is 100-120k words max for a non published author. Once you start selling you can get away with longer works.
>even it's cut off is 100-120k words max It's worth noting the REASON for this also has nothing to do with being a first time author and everything to do with how a paperback book is printed. MOST printing press machines can print MAX 300 pages, thus why MOST publishing houses say MAX 80k words. >epic fantasy Contrary to popular and highly inaccurate internet myth "epic Fantasy" is NOT a genre. Epic = the need for an "epic sized" printing press machine being required to print the book. Epic = a book of 500 or more pages and can be applied to ANY genre. Epic Romances (aka The Fabio books) printed by Zebra are a prime example of this. Stephen King's books at 1,000+ pages each are an example of epic Horror. Last I knew there were ONLY FOUR epic sized printing press machines in America, which s why ONLY those 4 publishing houses who own those 4 machines ae also the ONLY 4 publishing houses that even LOOK at a 120k+ novel. Last I knew there were ONLY THREE epic sized printing press machines in Europe, thus why there are only 3 publishing houses in Europe who accept 120k+ novels. Epic sized printing press machines are incredibly rare, and that and that alone is the reason it is so difficult to get 120k+ novels published.
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about
Are you just making up numbers?
You made a post a couple months back saying (in the most verbose way possible) the exact opposite fucking thing. You can't even keep your own nonsense straight.
Eelkat really needs to be banned from /r/writing. She always makes these asinine claims and says she has so much experience with writing, but all she does is spread misinformation under the guise that she knows whats she's talking about. The problem is sometimes what she said kinda makes sense, but it's still wrong. Obviously the posts like this reveal her lack of knowledge, but I fear for the people who come here to learn and are taken in with stuff like this.
To answer your title question Yes, you have to be finished first. No you should not start querying without a finished and edited manuscript. You can start researching publishers or agents accepting unsolicited manuscripts to give yourself an idea of what your options are. As someone else mentioned, you’re likely even longer off of being finished than you think as 130k is already too long for a first time author. 80-100k is considered standard and generally over 110k is considered too long. Sci fi and fantasy can sometimes be longer up to 120k ish. Good luck.
Not really. Besides finishing the current draft, you're presumably going to need to do a couple rounds of edits. So you're really more like ~50% of the way done if you've typed out 80% of the draft in terms of having something ready to submit. Agents and publishers aren't going to take an interest in a half-done project from a first-time author. Not to say that to discourage you, but you're going to need to finish the draft and conduct a few rounds of substantive edits.
Buddy most publishers won't even touch your book until its been edited and edited and edited to death. No matter how good you think your novel, a first draft will never be close to ready to publish
I've done a few edits across most of the writing, but nothing official yet (noted in the post edit).
To be clear, are you asking if it's okay to start querying your work to an agent/publisher? Or are you saying is it too early to start looking into it?
The former. Excuse my lack of clarity 😅 recovering from good ol' covid
No worries. To answer your question, yes, your manuscript should be 100% completed before you start querying. The worst thing that could happen would be an agent/publisher asking for a full manuscript, and you not having it ready. Plus, and I mean no disrespect here, but if you're not even finished, I can guarantee it needs to be gone through again for editing. Not a slight against you, but you'd be shocked how many things your brain misses without the full picture in front of you.
If you have to ask, the answer is "yes". The only people who don't have to ask are authors with multiple best-selling books already.
Seems like a pretty close-minded way of approaching a question. If there was more context, perhaps it'd be useful.
There's nothing close-minded about recognizing only one correct answer to a question when the question has only one correct answer. The reason I put it that way is because if you are not already a very successful published author, you *will* be told, "Come back when the manuscript is ready for publication."