Does a book have to be a certain length to be considered a novel?

Question

If so, how long? Or is the classification as a novel have more to do with plot and genre rather than length?

Answer 1

"How Many Pages Make a Novel?
That question just arrived in my email, and it's a good one. The answer is: It depends.

Some publishers, especially in genres like romance, have requirements as uniform as a muffin tin: Each manuscript will be long enough to fill a book of exactly so many pages. 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.

Then came the personal computer and the writer's own choice of typeface and point size.

This threw the old estimate right out the window, but word processors of course give us a precise word count—and word count is what most publishers are interested in.

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. Now they're more likely to hit 90,000 words. Fantasy novels seem to be about 125,000 words—per volume, with some series going on and on. Mainstream fiction can be anywhere from 55,000 words (about the length of many mass-market romances) to ten times that.

And how many pages will your published book have? Again, book design and typesetting can influence the total. I've noticed a lot of hardback mainstream fiction lately with text that's really double-spaced, with generous margins: clearly the author handed in a short manuscript, and the publisher is trying to puff it up into something that looks worth the price.

Mass-market paperbacks don't seem to have changed their design much, however, and I've noticed that a typical page of a paperback novel will run around 440 words...not quite the equivalent of two double-spaced manuscript pages. My novel Eyas was just about exactly 500 pages long in manuscript, and came out in print at 354 pages.

If you're working in a genre like SF or romance, it's always a good idea to visit the websites of genre publishers to see what length they want. If you go to Harlequin and browse through their FAQs, you'll see that different romance series require much different lengths, from 50,000 words to twice that."


How many words in a novel?

"The answer is to check the submission guidelines of the publisher you hope to please. Novels can range anywhere between 10,000 to 150,000 words. Research what your chosen publisher allows for your genre, and create the story accordingly."

Answer 2

Usually, a book has to be atleast 50,000 words to be considered novel length. But plot and genre also tie into it. You wouldn't consider a 200,000 word sypnosis about the mating habits of a starfish a novel, would you?

Answer 3

Yes, it might be a singular. While there are a few well studies within the thousand web page variety, for instance the Lord of The Rings ( as a entire, how it used to be written). However lots of them might have used a ruthless editor to cause them to larger. Most studies that lengthy are full of an excessive amount of fluff and padding. Have any of you ever had the misfortune to learn Battlefield Earth ( the guide used to be larger than the film however nonetheless.). It used to be over one thousand pages of horrid rubbish with an wonderful a hundred and eighty to 220 web page tale misplaced in its mass. The greatest crisis dangerous authors have is writing an excessive amount of.

Answer 4

Long enough to be boring.