Friday, December 18, 2009

Lying About Word Count

Don't. Do. It. Slush pile readers, editors, and agents aren't stupid. Soon as you send that Word document off to us with 1700 words stapled to your e-mail, and we realize the story seems longer, we're reviewing your word count only to discover it's 3,000 words longer than what your e-mail dictated (or perhaps 10,000 words longer if it's a novel and not a short story).

We're not stupid. Don't insult us.

3 comments:

& said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Emilia Plater said...

SO true. Lol, I'm an editor on my school's newspapers and we're always getting articles that have been triple-spaced, had their margins messed with, etc to seem like a bigger word count. Come on. :P

The Rejection Queen said...

This is true. Obviously a book that is 500 pages is not going to be 80,000 words.