Have any of you ever had problems with a book getting so long that you decided to split it?

My novel Peter's Angel is threatening to be 200,000 words or more. If that holds true, the print book would be in the vicinity of 600 pages long... Which is very cumbersome and expensive for a self-published print book. So I'm considering splitting it from a practicality standpoint.

So I have some questions. Has anyone ever needed to split their book? How did you go about it? Where did you decide to split it? Has anyone read a long book by another author that was split into multiple volumes for publishing? How was it divided? How were the titles formatted? Were the chapters numbered consecutively? Or did they start over with each book?

Keep in mind that we are talking about long books split into parts, not series of standalone books. Lord of the Rings is a prime example of this - it's technically one book, not a trilogy, but it was split into three books for ease of use.

(I seem to recall reading about word count *cuts* of that order of magnitude in the writing-advice books I picked up from used book sales at every opportunity growing up, so I'd be careful about making any firm decisions yet if you're still drafting it.)

The best recent example that leaps to mind is, unfortunately, one that I'm hesitant to recommend in this forum because it's (in addition to a fantastically-well-constructed fantasy world) a romance in the modern sense of that term: The Sharing Knife by Lois McMaster Bujold. The first two volumes of the series were designed to be a novel in two volumes; the third and fourth were originally intended to be the same, but turned out to be two one-volume novels. But here's some of the story-construction lessons that I think can be learned from those:

Try to end the first volume (and each non-final volume ...) with some sort of resolution, but pace it differently than you would the climax and resolution of a one-volume story.

It's helpful to slip some reminders of the world and of the-story-so-far into the beginning of the second (and following, if any) volumes, if you can do this subtly and not drag the pace of the story down, just in case a reader either hasn't read the first volume in a while or somehow hasn't read the first volume at all.

If possible, try to pick a natural dividing point between the two volumes. In The Sharing Knife, it's just after Our Heroes have gotten married and left her family's lands (and culture) to go visit his people. In The Lord of the Rings, the first Book (note that not only did the publisher split it into three volumes, Tolkien divided it into six Books) ends with the cliffhanger at the river, then the second picks up with his waking up in Rivendell, and Fellowship ends with the Breaking of the Fellowship.

Hope this helps; knowing my habits, I'll probably have to confront this sooner or later, but I'm nowhere near this point yet.

(By the way, if you do split it, will you publish one volume first, then the second some months later, or both at once?)

Oh dear... *consoles Lady E with cupcakes*

As usual, that was an extremely helpful post, Jon! Thanks so much! For the reasons you stated and others, I won't decide for sure if I'm splitting my book (and if so, where) until it's done. Because of the nature of this book, I don't expect to do a lot of cutting, but I also don't know precisely how long it will be until it's done.

If I do split it, I'm leaning towards splitting it on the part breaks that I already have worked into the novel simply because each part opens after a time jump. Therefore, there's naturally a little bit of "recapping" going on that could easily be modified to help refresh the reader's memory, like you mentioned.

My alternative, right now, is splitting the book right down the middle. There's a very epic twist which divides the book cleanly into "a story" and "b story," to borrow screenwriting terms, so it would make a good break. However, it would require some restructuring. I'll have to wait and see how long the book is overall - if my parts are long enough to be separate books (i.e., over 80,000 words each), that's probably the route I'll go with. If the parts aren't long enough but the book itself is still too long, I'll have to restructure so I can split in the middle.

I will have all of the writing and revisions done before I publish the first part. So if there's a gap between them, it will only be a month or two while I line-edit and format the subsequent parts. There's still a possibility that I might release it as a unit, but if I need to do parts for ease of use, I might as well line-edit and publish the first one before line-editing the second.

Oh, I thought of another example! The Riddle-Master Trilogy, which is really one complete story. Well, sort of. It is a trilogy, but it is a complete story. The first book so totally cannot stand alone. The ending is a nightmarish cliffhanger. I reread the book three times trying to guess how the story would come out... It was a logical conclusion of a part, but a terrible way to end a book. There was no resolution to anything. It worked as a trilogy mostly since the second book is from another character's POV. The second book had a self-contained plot arc, but the first and third did not. (The second book felt almost out of place... like an interlude.)

Intriguing! Thanks so much for sharing that. *needs to finish that trilogy... one of these days*

These are some good thoughts that have been shared. I shall be lurking here, since it looks, though very roughly, like my current story will be a long one. *Lurks in thread*

I chose to write a trilogy because I knew the story I was called to tell would not fit in one volume. It would not fit in two. So I went for three. If you have a story to tell, don't let word count stop you. Do what is best for your story.

Thanks for the thoughts and encouragement, Airianna! Actually, at one point in revisions, I'd pondered making this story a trilogy with each book having a different MC. However, I ended up revising the story to have one ultimate MC and a single arc. Now, despite the fact that I cut subplots in revising, I'm realizing that my book still might end up trilogy length... but it still has only one major arc and MC. So I have the interesting but fun predicament of splitting a book a la Lord of the Rings.

*nods * Thankfully I realized ahead of time how big my books would end up. It allowed me to figure out good places to end each book. Splitting the book halfway through is hard. I shall pray the Lord gives you directions in how best to divide your story.

Thank you very much. It's entertaining, but it should be fun. This book has survived worse disasters by God's grace... like, being deleted.

*knows what that's like *

This reminds me of how lots of older books are divided into sections called "Book One" and "Book Two" and so on. It also reminds me of how the original Les Miserables was five volumes, yet is still counted as one book.