Word Count

Be warned: this is all about me (& numbers)…..

After spending many days editing my memoir(yet again!),I clicked on Tools to check the word count, only to find that I had edited my work down (again!) to below 70,000 words, which is the word count I am (or was) aiming at – not for any particular reason (the 70,000 word idea) but it just seemed right. Now I am looking at 66,601 words.

In an attempt to make it more readable and therefore more acceptable to both a literary agent and the reading public, I have neatened and truncated it perhaps a little too much.

I Googled ‘average word count for a memoir’ and found a site written by Australian Literary Agent, Virginia Lloyd, suggesting that a LONG memoir would be around the 100,000 word mark and a very short one only 25,000. She (Virginia) then directed readers to a blog on the subject written by ex-literary agent Colleen Lindsay that stated 100,000 was an accepted amount of words for a memoir.

Geeez! I am now just as confused as I was before and wondering if I have really edited too tightly, and whether I should retrieve some of the ‘stuff’ I rejected, OR find another 30,000 words or so to make my offering (as I said) more suitable and therefore more readable.

But, then I think, why am I even concerned? This book of mine will never be published, so who cares what the word count is?

 

☺

 

Today is another day and I have renewed hope that one day my memoir will be published, so here I am, again, ‘nose to the grindstone’, writing away. Of course, next thing I’ll have to do is edit the new stuff I have just written and we know what happens then. (sigh!)

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