According to amazon s great text stats feature, the median length for all books is about 64,000 words. What writers fail to see is that for every successful exception to the rule e. While a general guideline is one page is 500 words single spaced or 250 words double spaced, this is a ballpark figure. Depending on your genre, having too many or too little can not only hurt your book sales. What follows is a rough guide to book length expectations in certain genres.
There are times when it helps to know how many words per page youre writing. An approximate word count round numbers based on what your wp tells you enables them to estimate costs and other factors involved in printing a book. Nonfiction wordcounts sit between 70,000120,000 words. Id guess that the actual average number of words in a novel was somewhere close. Estimates vary based on different kindle devices available, but the above settings translate into approximately 250300 words per page on average. Excluding endnotes and index, the book has about 200 pages of text, which means its total word count is about 74,000 words.
The first answer, because its novella length, not novel length were talking adult fiction, not chapter books and novellas are hard to sell. How many words should an average chapter have in a novel, and approximately how many pages. I use the target average of 1,500 words per chapter. Nonfiction books tend to be shorter, around 45,000 words on average, and novels ten to be longer, around 80,000 words on average. The figure was found through looking at a number of books text stats, until brave new worlds 64,531 word count landed in the exact center of all books50% of books have fewer words and 50% of books have more words. Novelist jane smiley suggests that length is an important quality of the novel. At a writers conference i recently attended, publishing veteran jane friedman said 80,000 words is good for most fiction, below 60,000 isnt novel length territory, and above 120,000 is likely too much. It depends on the font you are using, of course, but in general, 250300 words per page. Amazon ebook page length by genre kindle page length.
Right now, when it comes to novellength word count, its all about 90,000 words. Anything in this word count wont scare off any agent anywhere. Each page contains about 34 lines, with an average word count of 11 words per line, thus 375 words per page. Frequently asked questions getting published meg cabot. This is a 100% safe range for literary, mainstream, womens, romance, mystery, suspense, thriller and horror. How many words in a novel vary depending on genre, audience, and the story itself but in general, the average words in a novel is between 60,000 and 90,000 words for most genres. To save the time and effort of counting wordbyword, often a rule of thumb for the average number of words per line was used, such as 10 words per. Novels for adult readers fall between 80,000 and 120,000 words. However, it will be on the short side, as the average length of a novel hovers. If your story justifies the length, you neednt worry if you get up to 150,000. Guess how many words are in a novel by gabe habash for pwxyz according to amazon s great text stats feature, the median length for all books is about 64,000 words. One of the questions that a new writer often asks is how long should my book be. I am trying to write a program that calculate the average word length in a sentence and i have to do it using the.
A story that is over 40,000 words is generally considered a novel. The word count is the number of words in a document or passage of text. The average wordcount for adult fiction is between 70,000 to 120,000 words. Between 80,000 and 89,999 words is a good range you should be aiming for. Knowing how many words in a novel is the first step toward writing a book. For childrens fiction, the general rule is the younger the audience the shorter the book, and for ya novels the average is 50,00070,000 words. Id guesstimate that nonfiction books generally yes, this is very rough run perhaps 150450 pages, and at about 350 wdpage that works out to something like 50150k words. Before you decide your average chapter length, its a good idea to think about the purpose behind dividing a book into chapters. Everything you need to know about word count and book length for books and novels. Virtually every book i try to shop by a debut author thats any longer than thatregardless of categoryreceives the same response from editors. Publishers want to know the overall length of your book.
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