amount of words in the average novel
Choose three novels you enjoy and count the words. Here’s how: first, count how many words are on an average page (you can count the average words in a line, then multiply by the number of lines), then multiply that number by the number of pages. This will give you a rough estimate of the word count. Anyway, here’s a sampling of classics and where their word counts land them on the spectrum. Click on the title to view all the statistical viscera. Animal Farm. 29,966 words (75% of books have more words) Ethan Frome. 30,191 words (75% of books have more words) Why You Should Write to Word Count. Right now I’m obsessed with a novel/web serial called, Worm. It’s by an author who goes by the pen name Wildbow. The novel is 1.75 million words long, the equivalent of about 7,000 pages, give or take. When I first opened it on my Kindle, it said it would take 110 hours to read. Agatha Christie, the bestselling mystery writer of all time, wrote novels that averaged about 40,000 to 60,000 words. However, most agents and writers say your mystery novel should be the same word count as general fiction, 80,000 to 90,000 words. We’ll do more research on this, but if in doubt, shoot for 80,000 words. They’re just not. Apart from anything else, my own first novel was 190,000 words long and it sold to HarperCollins for a lot of money. The per novel word count of my Fiona Griffiths series stands at about 125,000 words, and several of the books go over 130,000 words. The number of words in a novel will vary depending on the genre. A young-adult novel will run between 20,000 and 40,000 words. That would be the length of a novella in mainstream fiction. Many genres seem to have succumbed to supersizing. A mass-market western, mystery or SF novel used to run to 60,000-70,000 words. A good agent will never charge a fee for her work on your behalf. However, if an agent agrees to take on your work, when she places it, she will earn a 10-15% cut of whatever money you make from the sale. So if a publisher offers you $10,000 for your book, your agent will get $1,500 of that money. You will get the rest. You can get an agent the same way you get a publisher: by finding a book on how to get them (such as the one by Jeff Herman) and sending them query letters. According to Amazon’s great Text Stats feature, the median length for all books is about 64,000 words. The figure was found through looking at a number of books’ text stats, until Brave New World‘s 64,531 word count landed in the exact center of all books–50% of books have fewer words and 50% of books have more words. Up to 180,000 – Still OK, but you really, really need to justify that word count.) But the lower limits are quite a lot lower. A good, short literary novel might be 60,000 words. A very good, very short one might be as little as 45 or 50,000. Others are far more flexible. In the days of the typewriter, a double-spaced page with 1-inch margins would hold an average of 250 words. So you could assume that since 4 pages = 1000 words, 240 pages = 60,000 words, which was the typical length for most mainstream and mystery novels.
Vary depending on the genre,A young-adult:20,000 and 40,000 words,mass-market western, mystery or SF:60,000-70,000 words.