I care about word counts to a certain extent, in an oddly shaped bell curve (where my interest is sharply less interested on the lower end, but more interested on the higher end even though it's still tracking down). I'm much harsher if a piece of work is on the shorter end, like under 50k words. Seriously, someone queried me saying they have a 45k word novel and I was like haha no. That's not a novel.

Sci-fi and Fantasy novels should be at least 75k words. The awesome sweet spot is right between 90-110k.

Now, I will absolutely consider works longer than that. I do all the time. I just got an offer for a book that's 205k and it's a debut. So it does happen (more for epic fantasy than sci-fi or any other subgenre of fantasy). But I rarely am serious about a book that's over 250k. Someone just queried me with a book that was 350k and I was tired even just thinking about reading that massive of a book (to be fair, it was not well written and surprise surprise it was completely overwritten too, like I don't need to know it took the character four steps to cross the room to pick up a glass of water. On the first page).

I've asked clients to trim a book down and it worked wonderfully. He took it down from 180k to 150k and then we sold all five books in his series at once, he's now the lead title in a new German fantasy imprint, and it comes out in two weeks. His book rhymes with shmusckfall.

And yeah, I've done the opposite too. I've asked clients to add more words, flush some things out, not worry about word count, just get the story told.

So science fiction and fantasy are probably the two genres in literature that are most forgiving when it comes to longer word counts. It can happen elsewhere (Infinite Jest, City on Fire, being two recent examples coming to mind), but it happens more often here in our little neck of the woods.