Too Many Words?

Too many words is a thing? I don’t know about you guys out there but for me I like books regardless of their size. I don’t discriminate based on page or word count. With that said I am not scared of a book with a page count that has a comma in it in fact I enjoy challenges like that. I was unaware when I first started writing that publishers and agents looked at that sort of thing and it could sway their decision to publish or represent you. I actually had one agent turn me down because they felt that the book was too large and that I needed to cut it in half. This was odd to me because they told me this prior to reading my novel. Now that I am at on my third novel I do take into consideration the page count and overall size of the novel while I am planning it out.
For me, I want my readers to enjoy the adventure of the novel and not finish it in one three hour sitting. I want my novels to take a weekend or more to really keep your thoughts about the story floating and keep you thinking about it as you go about your daily life. At least I hope that’s how it happens.
The key to this is to find that perfect balance. To not cut out so much that your story no longer makes sense and also not to leave so much in there that the reader gets lost in the chapter and gets bored with the overall story. I don’t know if there is some fast easy way to accomplish this all I know to do is to take my time and follow the story as I go through my first draft and then during the editing stages I start trying to figure out what to cut and what to keep or add.
I know that the way I write won’t work for everyone and that’s great, if we all wrote the same then books would get boring and repetitive. I am just trying to get a few ideas out there as to how I do things to maybe help someone along their journey.