According to the Nebula Awards the lengths of the various categories of fiction is as follows:
- Short story < 7,500 words
- Novelette 7,500 - 17,499 words
- Novella 17,500 - 39,999 words
- Novel > 40,000 words
Some people say a novel is anything over 50K words (NaNoWriMo for a start), not 40K words. Others aren't interested in anything less than 75K or 90K.
Some of it is very dependent on genre as well.
When researching this post I found a very interesting article by literaryrejections.com about what agents are looking for depending on genre. If you would like to see their whole post it is here: Word Count @ literaryrejections.com.
I find it very interesting that they list Romance as being anything from 40K to 100K, where are Sci-Fi and Fantasy don't even start until 90K even though the Nebula awards defines novels at much lower lengths. I can only assume this is to do with the difference between established writers and new writers. It is easier to sell novels of a certain length so agents looks for those word counts; once you have a fan base varying lengths are an option.
What do you consider novel length? Do you expect different lengths from different genres? Do you even care?
Do you prefer a book description to tell you how long the book is?
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I like reading long books. My fantasy novels have all been between 80K and 120K and my romances have ranged from 78K to 100K. I think the numbers are less restrictive because of the rise of ebooks.
ReplyDeleteYes, I definitely think the game has changed with eBooks, but from the looks of things the trad pub route still has some fixed ideas.
DeleteWord count/novel length is also something I've looked into. It's pretty crazy how much the numbers can vary, depending on genre and depending on who you ask. I agree with the Nebula guidelines, they seem reasonable and it's helped me decide my novella is, actually, a novella (at just under 19K words--I've seen some claims that anything under 20K is a short story...).
ReplyDeleteI do expect different lengths for different genres, to an extent. But sometimes I feel like the leeway given to fantasy novels (that they generally will have a higher wordcount than other genres) is sometimes taken too far. But then, I like concise novels, so it's really just a preference thing. Ultimately, I don't really care. If the story is good, the story is good, and it will need as many words as it needs to tell it properly.
20K a short story??!! What world are they living in? ;) There is nothing short about 20K.
DeleteI'm the same, as long as it grabs me I don't care about length. I think sometimes too much leeway is given to some established authors though and you end up with bloated books. Not many, but it does happen.