How Many Words Is The Average Novel

top view of various-sized books

Why Your Book Length Matters

Readers have expectations most volume length according to genre. Creating a book outside genre guidelines minimizes your chance of selling to your target readers. Editors at publishing houses are enlightened of the book-length guidelines and will dismiss your book out of mitt if it doesn't meet those expectations.

Knowing the platonic length for your genre helps to plan the sequence and the story arc of your book. Merely how do you lot know the all-time length for your book? And how exercise you summate volume length?

The publishing manufacture has guidelines for genre volume length. We'll go through those in detail.

Books come up in various sizes and are printed with different fonts and leading, so the number of pages is not a articulate answer for length. The all-time style to summate length is past the number of words.

Nigh writing software (MS Word, Google Docs, Scrivener, Ulysses, etc.) has a give-and-take count feature. You tin can set your target word count and the software tracks your progress to warning y'all when you lot take reached your discussion count goal.

Word count matters because every book bears an inherent contract with the reader. That contract depends on the genre, and your genre mandates a word count for your volume.

Average Length of a Novel

Most publishers consider novel length every bit between 50,000 and 110,000 words. The average length is about 90,000 words. Big, epic stories can be 120,000+ words.

If you are a first-time author, aiming for effectually xc,000 words is a safe goal.

But genre impacts the standard length readers expect.

couple in romantic encounter on the stree

Genre Length Demystified

The following are average word-count ranges by genre.

Full general Fiction

Flash Fiction: 300–1500 words
Short Story: 1500–30,000 words
Novellas: 30,000–fifty,000 words
Novels: 50,000–110,000 words

Fiction Genres

Mainstream Romance: 70,000–100,000 words
Sub-genre Romance: 40,000–100,000 words
Scientific discipline Fiction / Fantasy: 90,000–120,000 (and sometimes 150,000) words
Historical Fiction: lxxx,000–100,000
Thrillers / Horror / Mysteries / Criminal offence: 70,000–90,000 words
Young Adult: 50,000–80,000

Children'due south Books

Picture Books: 300–800 words
Early Readers: 200–3500 words
Chapter Books: 4000–10,000 words
Middle Form: 25,000–40,000 words

Non-Fiction

Standard not-fiction (Business, Political Science, Psychology, History, etc.): lxx,000–80,000 words
Memoir: 80,000–100,000 words
Biography: eighty,000–200,000 words
How-to / Self-Assistance: xl,000–50,000 words

These are average guidelines. Y'all don't demand to take them as definitive. Keep in mind that readers accept expectations for each genre. When you go outside the guidelines, you lot are asking readers to exceed their expectations.

First-time writers will fair better if they aim for a discussion count within the guidelines. Make your way in the volume publishing arena with thousands of books in competition past giving readers what they wait. Employ these numbers as a baseline for your writing goals.

Readers may not exist aware of their book-length expectations. Avert jarring them past going outside the guidelines.

open book with fanned pages

How Many Pages Is That?

If yous want to estimate the number of pages for your book, you lot tin divide the discussion count by the number of words on a page. Standard manuscript formatting of double-spaced document in 12-point font contains about 250 words. The same text formatted for unmarried-infinite is nigh 500 words.

When y'all upload a file to Amazon to make an eBook, Amazon uses your discussion count to estimate the number of pages. Dave Chesson and Kindlepreneur surveyed his readers and found averages. For fiction, the boilerplate is 280 words per folio. For non-fiction, the boilerplate is 230. Here's a brief video of his results.

Using the novel instance of 90,000 words, that breaks downwards to well-nigh 320 pages. An eighty,000 discussion non-fiction book works out to about 350 pages.

Either way, even if you write just ane page per day, y'all'll accept a completed manuscript in less than a year.

Your Writing Goal

Now that y'all know the give-and-take-count guidelines for your genre, you lot can set your goal and keep writing. Recollect these are not carved in stone, they are guidelines. If yous become a footling over or a little under your readers won't discover.

If your finished novel is 240,000 words, you'll need to trim with heavy edits to bring it down to a reasonable length for your readers. Or if your mystery novel comes in at less than 50,000 words, you may beef it upwards with a subplot.

Knowing your word count before you lot write tin help you better programme your narrative arc and your writing schedule. You know your writing style best, the trick is to match your genre to achieve the advisable length for your genre.