What Do You Do When Someone Tells You That You Have Too Many Characters.

Do you have too many characters?

Is your novel feeling flooded? Are you readers telling you that there are just simply too many characters to keep track of?
Or, on the other hand(which happens to be my right one, and it hurts), do YOU think you have too many characters?
If I may intrude, I'm going to attempt to help you through this by telling you what I do, because, most of the time, I have far too many characters.
First things first. Do what most people tell you to do. Eliminate the useless characters.
At this point, you're probably wondering how you should go about this, especially when this post is supposed to be telling you how. Now, I'm not going to make things totally easy for you, because writing is not an adventure when things are going smoothly, no matter how much you may covet writing going smoothly. I'm going to make this as simple(or not so simple) as possible.
Personally, my method of eliminating useless characters is to go through my book, and figure out which ones I can delete without making the book not make sense. Once I figure out the ones that have nothing to do with the plot, and have said and done basically nothing, then I enter their names in the "Search and Replace" thing and delete them. Then I go through and delete any dialogue they had, or anything they did.
If I find I still have too many characters, I find a battle that is either recent or in the book's near future, and then I kill several characters off in the battle. This may not help you much if you aren't writing fantasy by the by, unless you haven't already guessed that.
However, characters is my weakness. I love developing them, writing them, creating them, and spending time with them. By the end of a novel, if all goes well, I tend to care for what they care fore, love what they love, and sometimes, they even convince me to read a certain book, listen to a certain song, or eat a certain food.
Characters are people, and like people, they impact your every day life, and fill it with meaning.
Just remember, though--you and your characters are nothing without God.
Before I go, I have a question. What do YOU do when someone tells you that you have too many characters?

-Author