Sommer Leigh wrote: Totally unsolicited advice, but you might want to do some research on the acceptable word counts in your genre because 150,000 is high for all areas of sci-fi for adult, particularly for a debut author. Most of the adult word counts for sci-fi are between 90,000-120,000, with 120,000 being the exceptions, not the rule.
#This opinion pertains purely to Fantasy#
While I won't disagree with what Coleen said, I will disagree a little with your advice (even if only in tone, as opposed to fact)....
Fact 1: a number of debut adult fantasys (moreso than Sci-fi my poorly informed intuition tells me) are waaaay above the 120K mark.
Fact 2: all novels should be as good as you can make them, irrespective of length.
Fact 3: Length does not infer quality, And that's the long and short of it (HAHA...I made a funny!!!).
Take those facts and apply to them two quotes from two famous writers
Quote 1 (Orson Scott Card): "A novel is as long or as short as its needs to be to tell the story."
Quote 2 (Brandon Sanderson): "I kept on writing 200K books because that was what I wanted to write. I just made them good enough they couldn't NOT publish me"
Therefore, write whatever you want to, make it as good as you can, improve by the end, keep writing, and word counts will mean nothing. You could look at word counts, if only as a guide to see how high the hurdle you have to jump is, but then that applies to any part of the publishing process....And in the end it can only be demoralising, just as listing the mathmatical probablilities of getting published in the first place. You write because you want to, So why write something you're not entirely happy with??
What would you rather publish: a 200K novel you love, or a 120K novel that feels hollow and undercooked??
What is a publisher going to want to read: A 200K story written with passion, or a 200K story with 80K words ripped out of it??
Sorry Sommer, I just disagree, I think there's no value in not writing the story you want to, and there's a ton of books out there that bypass those wordcount limits, all of varying 'subjective' quality (I'm pretty sure Gail Martin's The summoner is over 120K, and I didn't think much of that at all). So my counter advice would be to ignore the word counts, but learn to guage how much space a plot and a style needs to "work"
On a completely side rant: nothing makes me want to physically educate someone like the insistance that any book over 100K is padded and overwritten. God, the conceit!!! fact, any story can be boiled down to a handful of words; the rest is just padding. Therefore, EVERY BOOK is essentially 99.99% padding. Telling me that anything over 99,900 words of padding is too much is like saying that Vin Diesel is clinically obese purely because of his BMI! It's about muscle mass, and bone density, and build, and natural weight - in the same way a novel is about pacing, and character arcs, and complexity and style.
Anyone,
Anyone, who looks at a single number and intentionaly supplants the correct phrase "I don't think I'd like a book that long" with "This book is too long" is guilty of either ignorance or hubris.