Most writers who blog and comment seem determined NOT to be an exception, and strive to find out and conform to all sorts of rules and commands and advice. This article and our comments contain examples of such caution. Writers and people in general fear the exceptional, in themselves and others. Thank you for all these lovely comments that allowed me to procrastinate for a few more minutes from actually writing. This is a fair beginners number guide. All this is excellent information to keep for reference, but I am wondering about short stories in an anthology.
How many words in an anthology might be economically publishable? How many stories included? How many words in an average story included in an anthology? Thanx for your time and trouble. The thing you have to keep in mind is the cost of production. You may enjoy an page story just as much as a page story, but when you get to the checkout, do you want to have two stories for your money, or one?
Uh, no. Word count is negotiable. If the publisher has a convincing argument for cutting a passage or two, the book will be shorter. If it has areas that need further explanation the word count will go up. Keep an open mind and make your case.
I think that editors and publishers have specific expectations about the length of the novel more than readers do. Many of the most popular recent books are well over , words. I just finished Pachinko, which is over pages long, and A Little Life, which is pages long. Readers tell me that they like getting lost in a book.
Many readers just want a story that keeps them reading! Not a memoir. However, the good news is: any writer on here can prove Blake wrong. If you think a ,word memoir will make it past the agent, do it! But Blake is trying to give everyone here some guidelines.
No commenter has suggested a , word memoir. Most of Mr. Clearly different editors have different guidelines. Hi Ann, can you give me an example of a published , word novel? So a , word count makes that novel somewhere around 1, pages. So you simply have a better shot of getting published if your novel is under , words. Shantaram David Gregory Roberts , The Mountain Shadow same author , and 1Q84 Murakami are 3 of my favorite recent books and all hover around , words.
Murakami worked up to it. Roberts probably got lucky that someone took the time to give a first novel of length that kind of attention. Shantara is listed at pages, that puts it around , words. The Mountain Shadow is a little shorter, listed at pages, making that around , words. Even 1q84 is listed at 1, pages, or about , words. All extremely long novels, especially considering most novels I pick up in the New Release scection hover at about 80, or less.
But still a ways away from , words. As you stated the above novels must be exceptional works or extremely established authors, or both, to get published at that length. I think one of the issues people have is mistaking an exception for a rule. Just because an exceptional author gets their , word space odyssey with their goldfish as the protagonist published everyone assumes word counts irrelevant.
Page number is a terrible way to estimate word count as it depends on the size of the pages, the font size, the font used spacing, leading etc. So to be specific — Shantaram is , words.
The Mountain Shadow is , words. So yes all are under , words, but barely. Most published books average closer to words per page than The King James Bible is over , words. A novel should be as long as it needs to be same with nonfiction and no longer and no shorter.
The word round the agent blogosphere is that these books tend to be trending longer, saying that you can top in the 80Ks. However, this progression is still in motion and, personally, I'm not sure about this. I would say you're playing with fire the higher you go.
When it gets into the 80s, you may be all right—but you have to have a reason for going that high. Again, higher word counts usually mean that the writer does not know how to edit themselves.
A good reason to have a longer YA novel that tops out at the high end of the scale is if it's science fiction or fantasy. Once again, these categories are expected to be a little longer because of the world-building.
Concerning the low end, below 55K could be all right but I wouldn't drop much below about 47K. The standard is text for 32 pages. That might mean one line per page, or more. When it gets closer to 1,, editors and agents may shy away. Deconstructing five spooky picture books with spoilers and word counts. I remember reading some Westerns in high school and, if I recall correctly, they weren't terribly long.
There wasn't a whole about this on agent and editor sites, but from what I found, these can be anywhere from 50K to 80K. Memoir is the same as a novel and that means you're aiming for 80,, However, keep in mind when we talked about how people don't know how to edit their work. This is specially true in memoir, I've found, because people tend to write everything about their life— because it all really happened. Coming in a bit low K is not a terrible thing, as it shows you know how to focus on the most interesting parts of your life and avoid a Bill-Clinton-esque tome-length book.
At the same time, you may want to consider the high end of memoir at 99, Again, it's a mental thing seeing a six-figure length memoir. You have agents like Nathan Bransford now formerly an agent and Kristin Nelson who say that you shouldn't think about word count, but rather you should think about pacing and telling the best story possible—and don't worry about the length.
Yes, they're right, but the fact is: Not every agent feels that way and is willing to give a ,word debut novel a shot. Agents have so many queries that they are looking for reasons to say no. They are looking for mistakes, chinks in the armor, to cut their query stack down by one. And if you adopt the mentality that your book has to be long, then you are giving them ammunition to reject you. Take your chances and hope that excellent writing will see your baby through no matter and I hope it does indeed break through.
But I believe that we cannot count on being the exception; we must count on being the rule. That's the best way to give yourself your best shot at succeeding. Push yourself beyond your comfort zone and take your writing to new heights with this novel writing workshop meant for novelists who are looking for book editing and specific feedback on their work.
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Word count guidelines do, however, differ between genres and age groups.
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