Word count guide: How long is a book, short story or novella, novelette, etc.?
If you hold up a physical hard paper-back book, the length of a book matters.
Usually in books’ self-publishing, the genre influences the usual number of words a book has. A sci-fi epic will be longer than a romance novel. There aren’t any hard and fast rule though; just a thumb rule. Word count decides whether a book is a short story, novella, or a novelette.
A short story is any story between 1000 and 30,000 words. A tale of fewer words is considered flash fiction. Novelettes word count is 10,000 to 30,000 words, novella has 30,000 to 50,000 words; novels are books with more than this count.
Young Adult novels (deals with heavy topics) should be anywhere from 40,000 to 80,000 words.
For kids eight to 12 years old in the middle grades, books should have between 20,000 and 50,000 words.
In the seven to eight-year-old age group, children should have an average count of 1000 to 10000 words with a lovely book cover design.
Between the ages of four and eight, children have picture bookstend to have around 500 to 600 words.
For first time writers, there’s an unspoken rule that your manuscript should be able to tell the tale in less than 100,000 words and for sci-fi it should be 120,000 words maximum.
A piece of advice; do not let your creativity be interrupted by the thought of how many words to write. Just let your words flow. You can compact/expand it later. Book design services provided by publishers as White Magic Studios will guide you.
Short stories and novellas are different from long novels with respect to word count, character development, world building, fewer sub-plots and marketability. The best way to publish your short story is to look for magazines or publications who publish short stories only.
Word count have to be considered when writing a book, especially if you’re just embarking on your literary journey.
From the publishing point of view, it costs the same to edit/format and design a novella as well as a novel. If you’re a new writer, rememberthat:-
- Shorter novels are more marketable: Very long novels are not accepted by a traditional publisher. An adult fiction book is most marketable as short novels.
- Very long novels are more expensive: Even if you get it done by a professional self-publisher, the expenses incurred will not be feasible (in terms of cost and profits); unless you’re as lucky as J. K. Rowling with her first publication.
- Readers do not like to be rushed with too much information in too less words; also not too slowly paced story.
In fiction word count is more specifically followed in different genres.
- Thriller- The ideal word count of a mystery is within the range of 50,000 to 90,000.
- Science fiction and fantasy- The usual concept is around 90,000 to 120,000 words. Science fiction requires more words than the others because it requires more words to explain the concept clearly.
- Romance novels- Romantic plots have to be short, fun, fast reads; perfect for a beach holiday. So these could be 50,000 to 100,000 word novel. Exceptions to this rule are there, such as “Wuthering Heights”.
- Historical fiction- Creating an imaginary historical plot necessitates a lot of words. Hence a historical novel may easily be closer to 100,000 words.
- Non-fiction- There are plenty of sub-genres in non-fiction & the number of words vary from each other. Memoirs for example are generally 80,000 to 90,000 words.
An e-book with a professional e-book cover design will suffice for the reader to pick it up, irrespective of the length.