How Long Should The Story Be?

My relationship with word limits has been difficult, to say the least. When I first began writing, I thought the word count meant something. I thought the more words you can write, the better you are. Ha, ha, let’s all have a good laugh about it now. This both negatively and positively impacted me.

The first draft I ever wrote was under 80,000. I was just doing it for fun so it shouldn’t have mattered how many words I wrote but I knew a novel had to be long, so there were times I was adding in unnecessary bits, just so I could name it a novel, as opposed to another piece of writing.

When I finally began to look into it, I didn’t really think ‘I should look this up’. No, I was more thinking about what it would look like, how many pages there would be, how thick it would be to hold it in my hands. I wanted to compare my word count to that of a book I had on the shelf. So, I went to the thickest book I had at the time: Brent Week’s The Way of the Shadows. The 183,135-word count shook me. My petty 70-something thousand-word book seemed inadequate. It had been hard for me to write that many words at the time, so this enormous book seemed to highlight my own shortcomings. Now I know that the amount of words you write is not a reflection of how good of a writer you are. More is not more. After all, (according to the internet in which I found three different answers to this question) J. K. Rowling first brought Harry to life in only 76,944 words. John Green broke our hearts and ruined our lives in only 67,203 words. At the other end of the spectrum, George R. R. Martin captivated readers with 298,00 at the least, and 424,000 at the most.

I’ve always told myself ‘less is more’ when it comes to writing, to remind myself not dawdle about over the page, but when it comes to word counts, I believe a better phrase is ‘quality over quantity’.

Before I learnt this, however, I was haphazardly writing my stories thinking 150,000-words (plus) was a good number to aim for, so imagine my horror when I finally get my hands on some accurate information and find the average novel sitting firmly at 80,000-120,000 words. Turns out, anything above that word count is considered an ‘epic’, and some publishing houses won’t accept them at all.

Different publishing houses and agencies will have different guidelines but for the most part, they are generally very similar. There are classifications depending on word counts and sometimes guidelines depending on the genre. Generally, the classifications look like this:

Flash Fiction – 500 – 1,000

Short Story – up to 10,000

Novella – 10,000 – 40,000

Novel – 60,000 – 100,000

Novels are generally between 60,000 and 100,000 words, but word counts ranging between 40,000 and 60,000 words can still be considered a novel. There aren’t really guidelines for genre word counts, but there is a general expectation of what each one might look like.

Mystery – 70,000 – 90,000

Romance – 40,000 – 100,000

Fantasy – 90,000 – 100,000

Science-Fiction – 90,000 – 125,000

Historical – 100,000 – 150,000

Thriller – 90,000 – 100,000

Young Adult – 70,000 – 80,000

Middle Grade – 40,000 – 50,000

My first thoughts were ‘why are there restrictions on art?’ I thought it was incredibly unfair that someone would ever reject my fantastic book just because it was too long, but I was new to writing, and I wasn’t looking at publishing as a business, and a business it is first and foremost.

As writers, we are passionate and creative, and, for me at least, everything a business is not. It’s been a long and difficult journey of learning for me because the more I learnt about the publishing business, the more discouraged I became.

However, the silver lining is, the more you learn, and the more you grow as a writer, the more this understanding helps and shapes you. No, we don’t want to be restricted or condensed as writers, but yes, we want our books and short stories and poems published! It is a business, and a tough business, so we must write to the market.

When a company has been working for a number of years in the business of publishing, they probably have an idea of what they’re doing (just a guess, can’t always be certain of these things). Remember, when it feels like the world is telling you how to make your art, these businesses set guidelines because they know what and how to sell, and how much a word count can impact the cost of materials. For a long time, I had the mindset of ‘convince the publishers’, and thought, quite literally, that there was nothing more to being a writer. I was already writing, I just had to write good enough for the publishers, then everything would be fine, smooth sailing. It’s only been later in life that I’ve realised the job doesn’t end there. The book needs to sell. Writing something good enough for publishers is only part of the journey, and one published book will not make a career – it needs to sell. If it does, great, but then the next one has to too, and the next, and the next.

 That being said, it does not mean a 150,000-word book can’t be published, or that it’s not great, or that it won’t sell. There are a number of outstanding books out there that stand well over this word limit. What it means, however, is you may have to prove your worth with a smaller book (one that sells), so your eventual publishers and agents have faith that your massive 300,000-word ground-breaking titan of a book will sell, and make more than it took to produce. Or publish an ebook, as there’s no concern for how many pages will need to be printed. Or, some publishing houses may be fine with a book over the word count. You’ll just have to find them.