As a writer penning a book, there will be times when no matter how tight you’ve made your storyline, or how close you’ve stuck to your planned number of pages, you’ve gone over your word count.

And not by a little. You’ve gone over it by a lot. So much so that you’re 20,000 extra words deep and haven’t even started the edits that give detailed life to your book world but bloat the word count.

With that amount of excessive words you’ll need to make drastic cuts, and if you have no clue how to do that, here are 5 ideas that will help.

5 Ways To Reduce A Big Word Count

If the word count for your genre, submission guideline, or self-imposed length is 20,000-50,000 words (or higher) more than it needs to be, it’s really easy to wonder what on earth you’re going to remove.

The…