How many words long should your novel be? The short answer is . . . as long as it needs to be. Remember, in making any form of art, there are no rules, therefore, deciding on the length of your novel is a bit like trying to figure out how long you are going to live; it is not entirely knowable until you approach the end.
However, there are some things to consider. You don’t want a story with more words than necessary, suffering from extraneous story arcs and redundant characters. On the other hand, you don’t want to cut the story short for the sake of making it more marketable. Otherwise, you risk depriving your reader of the full experience you have intended.
To help you decide if your novel needs to be any longer or any shorter, I’ll explore the topic of word count in this article. To start, I’ll outline the technical definitions that inform the term “novel-length” and how word count differs by genre. Next, I’ll talk about the reasons for this format. Finally, I’ll offer you a Story Weapon with some tips and tricks that can help you use what you’ve learned on your own work.
How many words you have in your novel should be as long as its story demands. Find a balance between industry word count standards and strong pacing with purposeful storytelling. While genres and markets offer helpful guidelines, using clarity, structure, and restraint matter far more than hitting a specific number.
Industry Standard
Let’s start with the basics. While there’s a lot of flexibility in how many words you’re “allowed” to have in your book, there is a minimum.
- Works under 7,500 words are considered short stories. You would need to string together a bunch of these to make a book.
- Works between 7,500 words and 17,500 words are called novelletes.
- Works between 17,500 and 40,000 words are called novellas.
- Finally, once you write that 40,001st word, you’re entering the realm of the novel.
These definitions are a bit porous. Some publishers consider 45,000 words a novel and others may ask for as many as 50,000.
In some cases, it also depends on your genre. For example, books for younger audiences tend to be shorter.
- Children’s books will likely come in at the low end of the novel range and many are much shorter than 40,000 words.
- Young adult books tend to span between 50,000 and 90,000 words, as do nonfiction books and memoirs.
- Fantasy novels tend to be the longest, with many easily crossing 100,000 words.
Finding the right word count for your story
So what can we glean from these trends and definitions? How many words do you really need? Try to think about a book as a container for a story; different types of stories require different containers.
Fantasy stories need big containers, as their scope tends to be sweeping. After all, they require a lot of words dedicated to describing their fictional worlds and magic systems.
Autobiographies (which are not the same as memoir) contain the story of a lifetime and tend to require a larger container as well.
“You will, I am sure, agree with me that […] if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.”
– Arthur Conan Doyle
Attention spans
These guidelines are also based on the attention spans of readers to a degree. After all, it takes some dedication to give time on a busy day to read a book and enter another world.
With the wealth of entertainment options available, keeping your story compelling helps keep readers invested. If the plot meanders, their interest dips. When the story is taut and muscular, it’s impossible to put a book down.
For the best stories, you don’t have to push yourself to keep reading. It sweeps you off your feet and picking up the book to continue the tale is less of a choice than a compulsion.
But this is less about word count than it is about masterful storytelling, thus a deep grounding in story structure can make a long book feel short, while lack of story structure can make a short book feel long.
And so, while these guidelines are here to give you an idea of what your publisher might recommend, ultimately word count should exist at the service of your story’s pacing.
Despite all the concerns that people’s attention spans are going down, books like Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros or The Midnight Library by Matt Haig hit near the 100,000 word mark and continue to prosper with modern audiences. There are way more than 40,000 words in each of those stories, but the pacing and rich characters keep people glued to those pages. Use these definitions if they help you, but don’t let them limit you. You might have an idea that needs a huge container. Just make sure you fill it to the brim.
Your story weapon: Tips, Tricks, Dos, Don’ts
- Less is more.
There are some ideas so rich and complex that we struggle to explain it to someone else. A book is an attempt to describe, discover, and explore something that we’ve imagined. Somewhere in the middle of the Venn diagram of your conscious and subconscious mind, there’s a story filled with characters and vivid settings. Your book is your attempt to carefully coax that story into the land of the living, where other people can interact with it and bring it into their own imagination.
It can be tempting to try to describe that world with as many descriptors as possible: it might smell like this and it looks a little like that. That’s great for your first draft. On your editing journey, the practices of restraint and brevity will serve you well. The more you take out, the stronger is the stuff that remains.
- Explore, don’t climb.
While setting a word count goal for each day of writing can help keep you accountable, try to not be too prescriptive in how long you want your book to be. Beginning your story is an intimidating thing; your first draft is often an attempt to convince yourself that you can write the thing at all.
If you start with the blank page and set the finish line all the way up a steep climb at 50,000 words, you’re putting too much pressure on the process. Like a baby just learning to walk, give yourself the gift of time to stumble and play before you decide to run the marathon. You’ll probably make it halfway there before you realize it.
- Leave them wanting more
It’s an old showbiz adage, but it’s just as true for the page as it is for the stage. A book isn’t a show-and-tell presentation; you don’t have to lay out all the cool things you imagined for the reader. Instead, the reader delights in the sense that there are parts of this world that exist just beyond the margins of the pages. Allusions to other adventures, other characters, little details that exist in your notes and not in the story. It gives a story cohesion and depth.
If you find that you’re stuck in the middle of a draft and there’s far too many blank pages ahead, you might want to take a short vacation from your story but stay in that world. You can jot down tidbits about other parts of the world or things that might have happened before the plot.
Your final word count will be much less than the number of words you write; between notes and drafts, you should have plenty of words to omit. The stuff you leave out is still important! Hints of the work you put in will still come across to the reader. Trust that your reader has an imagination, and that you don’t have to show them every blade of grass for them to know that it’s a lawn.
However long or short your story is, trust that your word count will end up in the right place! Your first draft is a long meandering cross-country road trip. You’ll miss a lot of turns, take unnecessary detours, and probably pop a flat along the way. Once you’ve marked the route of the story (which we might call the plot), the drive should be much faster the second, third, and fourth time around. If you can give yourself the grace to enjoy the ride, you won’t be at a loss for words. And with the right editing, you won’t have too many words either.
If you’re wrestling with how long your novel should be, or can’t tell if it needs more or if you need to exercise sharper restraint—this is exactly the kind of question we tackle in the Rewrite Master Class. Join us to explore structure, pacing, and revision strategies to help your story find its natural length.
