I recently joined a writing group on Facebook. I usually hate these Facebook groups. They are mostly about people trying to promote their stuff (I know, I’m guilty as well). But I realised I love looking for writers who are struggling and give them advice based on my experience or what I’ve learned.
One thing I see pop up a lot is: how long should my book be? How long should my chapters be? How many chapters should I have in a book?
Today, I try to answer those questions but I’m warning you, you’re not going to like it. Because the answer is: it depends. There is no straightforward answer.
A short story and a novella will still be considered books once you publish them but they are not novels. See where I’m getting at?
So…
How long should my book be?
Short story – are usually between 500-7,500 words. 500 words are considered flash fiction.
Novelettes – are between 7,500-19,000 words.
Novella – between 19,000 – 40,000 words
Novel – even though books with or longer than 40,000 words are considered novels, there is a tendency to for 50,000 words. That is why NaNoWriMo chose this round number. And yet, this number varies depending on your genre.
Word count by genre
Young-Adult
I see a lot of websites setting it to be 50,000-80,000 words. But I would say that 90,000 words is more common these days.
Contemporary romance
I’m not the biggest reader of this genre, but the internet made an estimative of 50,000-100,000 words.
Science fiction and fantasy
Again, it depends on your audience but for adult fiction, I would say between 80,000-120,000 is a good range.
Epic Fantasy
These books are usually longer and have a lot of description. Since worldbuilding takes so long they are around 160,000 words.
Advice
Try not to get too stuck with these numbers. The important thing is that you make sure you are telling your story right. Don’t add it with fillers just to make it look longer and don’t remove important stuff that will make your reader feel lost.
I once read about the experience of a writer, who had to cut her novel to 90k to meet the standards. This may be common for new authors but established authors tend to get away with it. She managed to do it just by cutting weak words and fillers. We never notice how many times we include unnecessary adverbs and words that don’t add any value to the sentence until we have to track them down one by one.
