Word Count: The New Bane of My Writerly Existence!

A few weeks ago the bane of my writerly existence was synopses, shortly followed by query letters. Now? Well, now it is just word count. You would think that words of any sort--counted or not--would be a writer's best friend. Right? Wrong. At least, not when you are writing something that falls into the Young Adult category and have a word count that is over 70k.

Like, way over 70k. Twice that to be precise.

Self Publishing Too Soon

I get it. I completely understand how this happens. It has been one of my biggest complaints in reading self publishing works as well as one of the biggest cons I have seen in articles about self publishing. You can always tell when an author published their work before it was truly ready for public consumption. You can see it in the typos, the formatting, the cover art, and sometimes in how the story is presented as a whole. Editing and cover art are the two issues I am going to touch on because they are the ones I am struggling with right now.

From what I understand of the traditional publishing world (which is admittedly very little as I am still peering over the cliff that is publishing before making that leap), a manuscript is usually not only given a copy editor but a content editor as well. And from what I understand, typically you have more than one copy editor. They are given (or create, little confused there) a style sheet that is basically a cheat sheet to you and your work and then they get to editing.