“How long should my book be?”
This is a question that comes up fairly often when working with early writers. It is a deceptively simple question that’s historically had very little data to help answer it.
A common and generally unhelpful answer is, “As long as it needs to be.” It’s an answer that is not only hard to implement, but I believe it is also built on the somewhat flawed assumption that if you have to tell an author how long the book is supposed to be, they’re asking the wrong questions. Another common reference you’ll hear is that the average novel is roughly 100,000 words long, which is sometimes even true. In reality, book length is dependent on the genre you’re writing in. 100,000 words is about right for Literary Fiction, but is substantially off for Romance, and totally wrong for Humor.
Given the data that we work with every day, I wanted to contribute some concrete, objective data points to the conversation.
Below is a self-contained graphic (in case it needed to be printed) containing the average length of a book in several common genres contained in the 85,000+ titles in the Book Genome Project, such as Literary Fiction, Science Fiction, Romance, Fantasy, and Biography. These are objective data points regarding the average length of books on the market today, as represented by the Genome database.
Average Book Length by Genre (Book Genome Project)
So there you have it. Of the 16,284 Romance titles in our corpus, the average length is 76,000 words. Fantasy is the longest genre, on average, with 122,000 words per book.
First Person vs. Third Person Perspective:
We also pulled up a breakdown of those same genres by perspective, as you can see in the graphic, as well. This is another interesting writing style difference. The data we use is not really binary, but most books tend to be either overwhelmingly 1st person, or overwhelmingly 3rd person. Rarely do they fall in the middle (though it is possible).
In general, third person (he said/she said) is a more common form of perspective than first person (I said). Across the entire corpus (regardless of genre) 69% of the titles in our corpus were mostly or entirely third person, with only about 31% being first person. What is most interesting to me, though, is that there appears to be a strong genre preference/bias. Autobiographies & Biographies, for example, understandably contain more 1st person titles than any other genre.
The first person Romance title appears to be particularly rare, for example.
On a final thought, I’ll reiterate that this is NOT a statement of what length or perspective a book should be written in. We’re not making any qualitative statements in this data, only quantitative. It’s clear that more books in our database are written in third person perspective than in first person perspective, but we consider this more a statement of a genre’s expectation than anything else. If a Fantasy fan picks up a novel at random, it’s a fair expectation that it will be in 3rd person more often than 1st.
That said, as an author, it doesn’t hurt to be cognitively aware that your 1st person, 150,000 word Romance epic is going to be breaking the mold of what most Romance readers are used to. Way to think different.
Aaron – Founder and CEO
I’d love to see these stats for YA. They would be radically different.
[...] Also interesting: first-person narration is even rarer in genre fiction. [...]
[...] Book Lamp on How Long is the Average Book? A Concrete Answer to a Longstanding Writing FAQ. [...]
We can probably pull those up. When I get back from Washington DC and NY in a week or so, maybe we can follow up with that. I am also curious about standard deviation for each genre in terms of length. We’ll see if we can dig into it a bit.
Aaron
[...] genres—as well as the most common perspective (first person or third person)—check out Aaron Stanton’s concrete answer to a longstanding FAQ. I learned that 90% of romance novels are written in third person! [...]
[...] How Long is the Average Book? A Concrete Answer to a Writing FAQ [...]
[...] how the length of your current WIP matches up against expectations? Aaron Stanton discusses average book length for various [...]
[...] else happens to be on tap. Continuing the exercise, assume each book contains 100,000 words (a reasonable estimate), and the goal is to read one book a month. At 300 wpm, that comes to another 11 minutes a day. Out [...]
I am writing my first story. It’s a love story, but not a romance novel. In it, I have two leads, a male and a female. It’s written from the third person.
I do dive into the male’s head. We know what he is thinking. But I am also telling the reader the thoughts of the female lead. How common is this, and is it something I need to avoid?
That’s called POV shifting, where “POV” stands for “point of view.” I’ve generally been told it’s a no-no because it makes the book ineffective. You CAN, however, write entire long passages from the perspectives of different characters. The thing to avoid is using a different point of view in every sentence or every paragraph.
I’ll check out the Book Genome website soon. Thanks!
my book’s a suspenseful romance about a lost man growing up as a rich individual who has an abusive, destructive dad that leads him down to destruction by having him steal away the girl he’s been in love with but she’s going out with his best friend who’s always been there through the thick and thin. this young man makes all the wrong mistakes and leaves his life in shambles after finally realizing that he made an idol of this girl and of money so much so he forgot what love really is about. i’m not giving the ending away, but by showing, in detail, through first person of this young man, i have made my novel only to the chapter where he is going to the prom with this young woman and i would like to show his adult years as well but i’m already up to 60,000 words. my question is this: should i publish the first half by giving an exciting ending, having the reader need to know what happens next, and when i’m finished with the both halves, i can publish the same book but have both halves in it about six months later after i have a fan club, or should i keep writing it even though i’m sure it will probably be 150,000 words?
Joshua – I think it’s dangerous to spend too much time trying to narrow yourself down into the standard. Romance novels do tend to be shorter than other genres, but you’re also writing a “Suspense” Romance – that might be a different standard. I’d tend to point towards one of Stephen King’s rules of thumb that he uses during writing, which is (if I remember correctly) to write the initial draft for yourself, however you feel it needs to read. Then edit for others. I believe he referred to it as write with the door closed, and edit with the door open.
I’d focus first on creating a first draft that satisfies you in terms of story, and then edit aggressively with information about book length on hand. 150,000 words is a fairly long Romance novel, but there are long Romance novels in existence. Gone With the Wind is not a short book.
Just a gut reaction? I’d probably aim for less than 90 – 100,000 words, if you’re wanting to fit into the general Romance expectations. Do you feel you can offer a complete and satisfying story by breaking it into two sections? My guess is that you’ll probably end up deciding that keeping the two sections together will end up being a better experience for the reader. There are certainly people serializing novels, but I think releasing a complete story will ultimately be more satisfying. Don’t split it unless you feel like you have two satisfying stories to tell.
[...] and by my estimation I’ve written 32,600 words. However, according to the chart on this page http://storytime.booklamp.org/2012/03/19/how-long-is-the-average-book-a-concrete-answer-to-a-longsta… that’s about 70,000 words short of average. On the plus side, I finally know what genre my [...]
thanks for this great, factual info – can’t wait to check out the rest of your site.
Aaron, I have a bit of a connundrum. I am a little past a third of the way done with my second scifi/fantasy manuscript (12 chapters done out of a planned 40) and so far, according to microsoft word, Its falling between 148,000 and 170,000 words depending on the font.
I changed it to courier 12 pt and set the line spacing to 24 pt, and the combination of all chapters in one word document said it was 585 pages long.
I must confess I am having trouble wrapping my brain around the concept of an average fanatsy book being 120,000 words long since i’ve passed that point (if MS word is to be believed) and i’m not quite 30% through the story I have planned.
I started writing on october 19th and I am getting the first pass of each chapter down pretty quickly all things considered. I am writing to establish as much story as I feel necessary for each part of the chapter outline, and I don’t feel like I am struggling to fill pages or word counts.. I was rather alarmed to see the variance between what is “average” and what is forming on my hard drive.
How well received would a sci fi book in the 400-500k word range be? Or, is MS word just plain wrong when its giving me the word count? Is word count really that big a deal? Some of the sites that I read imply that if its past a certain point no publisher would touch it… Any comments would be appreciated.
I love reading posts on this, great post by the way
Matt, it’s strange that the font seems to affect the word count, haven’t come across that glitch before, if it is a glitch!
585 pages sounds about right for 170K words and if you expect your manuscript to be around 400K-500K then you’re correct in thinking that it be extremely difficult, if not impossible to have it picked up by a publisher.
If you try and self-publish a novel that is around 1500 pages long then you’ll see why it won’t be picked up by publishers, the cost in manufacturing a 1500page book is astronomical and it’s just not worth the time to edit and test etc etc
It is rare to see a 1500 page book on the market, it does happen but is normally reserved for very well known bestselling authors.
However, the logical route in your case would be to finish the book and then devise a way to make into a trilogy, split into three parts.
Also a 120K novel in the fantasy genre is perfectly apt, David Gemmell’s work is around that but yo have to remember that everyone is unique and writer’s write different in many ways
Hope that helps!
[...] stood out based on actual data from about 85,000 books in the Book Genome Project. I give the link here for other writers and for interested readers. The post is from March 2012; here’s what caught [...]
Thanks for this post, the comments are useful too.
One possible solution that has just occurred to me is to take a look at the novels that have been published in the same genre as the novel that you are planning to publish, and use this as a guideline.
This is an extension of an idea that I have of checking which publishers publish the genre of novel that I am writing (historical fiction, the English civil war) and approaching these publishers when I have written the novel.
Finally, and this will probably be familiar to most posters, to me the sheer size of a novel is really daunting.
I have been publishing scenes from my novel on my website and it is of course pretty easy to write a scene.
However, if we liken writing a novel to building a house, a scene is just a single brick.
[...] http://storytime.booklamp.org/2012/03/19/how-long-is-the-average-book-a-concrete-answer-to-a-longsta… [...]
[...] 22 millions people have read 443 millions books. Supposing a book has on average of 90.000 words [7] and an average of 250 words per page [8], then we have that a book is 360 page long, 180 paper [...]
Thanks for the data mining. I think it would be helpful if you added standard deviations to the graphs.