The hunger games has 27 untitled chapters, and about 3700 words per chapter. Mar 20, 2020 is there a correct length for an ebook. So that usually includes everything from chapter books, to middle grade, to young adult novels. Oct 27, 2018 chapter length matters more than you think. To give you a general idea of the average chapter length, the range is usually between 3,000 to 5,000 words. But again as a surprise to me, dune was a close second, averaging just 3,800 words per chapter. When in doubt, i suggest people target 50,000 words to start. Armed with these word counts, i now have a range of lengths that have been proven popular. T he indie author chris fox coined the term potato chip chapters for easilydigestible book chapters of a certain size. An ebook could be 3,000 words or as long as a full length book. The length should be determined by the story itself, and as long as you do your job. Im not sure if im pushing the word count over, been trying cut back the word count. Oct 22, 2010 early readers are the earliest chapter stories that a kid can get.
Feb 24, 2015 sketch out your outline, make sure your structure works, and then start coming up with more clever titles for the chapters and parts, if you use those. Before you decide your average chapter length, its a good idea to think about the purpose behind dividing a book into chapters. Some novels contain 50 or more and some extremely rarely contain none. Oct 10, 2016 pages and chapters arent a great measure for length chapters can be any length, and pages vary wildly depending on font size and other formatting choices not to mention software. Also, the chapters are evenly divided into 3 titled parts. The figure was found through looking at a number of books text stats, until brave new worlds 64,531 word count landed in the exact center of all books50% of books have fewer words and 50% of books have more words. Most manga stories run for as long as their mangaka manga author wants them to, or as long as their readership demands.
And this ebook page length differs significantly depending on the book genre. If you are an author of a book or know of a book s accurate wordcount, contact me. Why does the length of a typical novel fall in the 80. If his book is 60,000 words long, the outline would be about 16th the length of the manuscript. The skys the limit for the maximum length, though anything over 250,000 is getting into war and peace territory. With digital books as well as print books available today, the length of manuscripts has begun to vary considerably.
How to calculate your books length before writing helping. Early readers are the earliest chapter stories that a kid can get. If you dont know how to find your documents word count, this article shows you how. There are no hardandfast rules on how long or short a chapter needs to be. And a typical howto nonfiction book might need between 7 and 12 chapters to do this.
If you know how long the book is, you can divide it into eighths to find the perfect timing for all your major turning points. This means your book will be between 100 and 230 pages in total. If you are writing a selfhelp book containing 10 steps to life improvement and each step 1 chapter, and you think you manuscript is going to be 10 to 15 pages per chapter, but you want to create an intimate reading experience, your book might be way too long for the 5 x 8 trim size. May 11, 2009 word count and book length getting published was indeed a good blog post. The page count is 32 or 40 pages with a word count of under 1,500. Its about 20k words more than a novella, so its right on the low end, id say. What follows is a rough guide to book length expectations in certain genres. Im curious about your advice compose the novel in the standard format from the start rather than changing it later why does this matter. Anything above 70k but less than 115k science fiction and fantasy tend to run up around 100k115k words. Eye of the world was one of the more normally distributed book in terms of chapter wordcount, which essentially means it had a mostcommon chapter length and a comparable number of chapters that were longer or shorter.
There are plenty of books that purposefully play with the word counts of their chapters. You can use comparable, successful books as models to determine the length you book should be. When i got back home i checked and found that her latest book published april 1, 2014, ive got you under my skin, has an average chapter length of 768 words. As with everything else when it comes to writing a book, these are only guidelinesnot rules. If youve written previous books, take a look at a handful of scenes and figure out the average length. A memoir is a work of art much more than the typical nonfiction book. You want 50,000 to 85,000 words for a fulllength selfhelp book, half that for a selfpublished ebook. Any less than 5 chapters, and your chapters may be running long or may contain too many ideas. If you take the advice on book length, then a 50,000 word book might break nicely into ten. So should i stay with this word count, or try to bring the word count down. Oct 18, 2017 if youve ever felt this sinking feeling before, youve already got a sense of why sectioning word count should be so darn important to writers. For most publishers, a book is novel length when its between 50,000 and 110,000 words. Surely when writing the important thing is to get words on the page even if theyre in pink comic sans. Realize it over the maximum word count for erotic, science fictionfantasy genre.
Typically books of poems with 1 page per poem are around 2530 pages long, however i have seen books that are longer than 50 poems. Compiling a list of longest novels yields different results depending on whether pages, words or characters are counted. A novelist of my acquaintance insists that the only way to estimate the number of words in a book is to multiply the number of pages by 250. This averages to about 22 to 23 chapters per novel, with the average chapter length around 4,280 words. If you plan to turn your ebook into a print book at some point, you might want to consider length. Dr 1 manga chapter 2 pages of a novel 1 manga volume 19 pages of a novel how i got my answer. How many characters of text letters are in an average book. By 2017, however, that number has dropped to 273 pages. I was looking for an accurate number for this as well, yet couldnt find one, so i did the research myself and got some rounded numbers. The total page count excluding appendices and index is 204 pages, thus about 93,000 words. The longest average chapter lengths were lord of the rings 7,500, prince of nothing 8,700, and the beefiest chapters were found. A reasonable word count for a nonfiction book would be between 30,000 to 50,000 words. Most agree that under 1,000 words would be rather short and that over 5,000 might be rather too long. If youd like some guidelines, you can assume that the average nonfiction book is 50k words, and that they have 12 chapters, so around 4k words would be an average chapter length.
Why chapter length matters more than you think medium. On one level, you could argue that word count, or length, is probably the last thing a fiction writer should worry about. The society of childrens book writers and illustrators scbwi does offer length guidelines in terms of the appropriate number of manuscript pages for various genres meaning the number of pages a writer would submit to a publisher. Apr 05, 2015 it word count 274,407 and page count 417. When writing a longer book that is aimed at 12yearolds and could maybe be considered tween, using the term upper middle grade is advisable. Each chapter will consist of one or more scenes that contribute to the development of the story. May 12, 2012 new writers tend to assume that a chapter must be a certain set length in order to maintain the average novel length of around 80,000 95,000 words, but in truth, chapters can be as long or as short as you need them to be.
And some books are simply shorter, following basic reading trends. This being said, there are plenty of books with 30 or 40 chapters. One of the questions that a new writer often asks is how long should my book be. While some need the length and those tend to stand out most simply need more revision and tightening. As a general guideline, chapters should be between 3,000 to 5,000 words. That was the formula in the good old days when courier. The length can vary greatly between genres, though. So the length of these affects the pacing of your story, and the way.
Many people read in spurts, at lunch time, or on the subway to work, readers enjoy chapters that can be finished in ten to fifteen minutes. But while the length of a novel is to a large extent up to its writer, lengths may also vary by subgenre. However, there are some general guidelines in this article that may help you determine the page count and chapter length needed for your book. Your job is to write a good story, and that means including all the detail needed to to make it good, and to leave out anything extraneous. More to the point, if the market for 5yearolds is defined by short books say, 80 pages long with a bit of simple text aimed precisely at that age group and with quite a few illustrations, then offering a publisher a book that is double the length and without a precise target age group just wont fly. You get to decide the typical length of your scene.
So, whats the sweet spot for an average chapters word count and. And in that case, people always ask, you know, how long should my chapters be. Theyre very short in terms of manuscript length 1,500 words max but are broken up into either chapters or vignettes that will give the reader the feeling of reading a book with real chapters in it. In terms of words, memoirs tend to be comparable to novels. Word count estimates are not guaranteed to be accurate. Reading length is a participant in the amazon services llc associates program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to and affiliated sites. If im writing a novel, this gives me 40 chapters and 70,000 words when im done. Check with your publisher to be sure there isnt a set format for chapter length. Ill walk along published may 12, 2011 has an average chapter length of 1,021. But remember, this is more of a guideline than a rule. According to amazons great text stats feature, the median length for all books is about 64,000 words. First thing to do is estimate the average length of a scene. Mar 26, 2014 so if youve been wondering about chapter length, my best counsel is to. Length can vary and become an intention part of your storytelling.
Though the average word count of a chapter is around 2,000 5,000 words, it all depends on your story. How to create chapters in your novel ny book editors. These are books that resemble young adult in matter and storytelling. If perhaps it had even more pictures it would be even a lot better. Readers of individual genres anticipate certain book lengths, and so do publishers. I use the target average of 1,500 words per chapter. Each chapter in your book tells a ministory that forwards your overall plot. The dragon reborn was rightskewed, which means there was a heavy distribution of exceedingly long chapters. First, provide an estimated character count for a standard book. Analyzing chapter lengths in fantasy fiction creativity. Fortunately, theres no set rule for chapter length. Publisher production costs some books are written to a specific format, and as such word length for chapters matters a great deal. New writers tend to assume that a chapter must be a certain set length in order to maintain the average novel length of around 80,000 95,000. I believe your book will morph and evolve throughout the writing, and so those first few chapters, though written, will not actually be complete until youve finished the book.
The original question had a followup statement, which was as follows. James patterson the mostselling author in the world is famous for his tiny chapter of a page and a half around 250500 words. For example, if your book has about 20 chapters, you can put about 10,000 words in each chapter. The title with the shortest chapters, on average, was whirlwind in the thorn tree, averaging just 2,900 words each. I tend to be more critical of ya manuscripts exceeding 8090k and have to be blown away to want to read a full that length or longer. This looks like a simple question, but you have to look at several factors before you can determine optimum length. The length of each of these pieces of the story can drive the pacing. Once you have a vision for your booksmall, standard, or wide formatyou can move on to the second step in deciding how many words you should write. Another interesting way to find a good chapter length i think, would be to sit down and read a book from the first chapter, for about 510 minutes, or however long you wish your chapters to be, and see how many words you have read in that amount of time. I shoot for an average of 2500 words per scene, so if i were writing your book. So, whats the sweet spot for an average chapters word count and why should it matter to you. Controlling chapter lengths in your novel advanced fiction writing.
There are beats between sentences, between paragraphs, and between chapters or sections. Somewhere around the 20page mark is about the average. Beginning writers often ask how long the chapters in the novel they are working on should be. And dont forget to calculate what your word count will be. Length of a book is typically associated with its sizespecifically page countleading many to assume the largest and thickest book equates to its length.
The 57 year old reading range straddles a few different categories of books. Knowing the typical word counts of different types of childrens books will help you understand what goal you need to hit. With upper middle grade, you can aim for 40,000 55,000 words. Guess how many words are in a novel by gabe habash for pwxyz according to amazon s great text stats feature, the median length for all books. May 19, 2008 and ya novels, which have grown in popularity, can often be the same length as a standard novel 80,000 words. Length can vary and become an intention part of your. For most publishers, a book is novellength when its between 50,000 and 110,000 words. If your word count comes in too high or low, you could raise eyebrows with publishers. When i was a kid, books tended to have about seventy thousand. If youre drawn to writing much shorter tales, the ideal is to make them part of a series or to link them in some other way so that you can publish several of them in something vaguely novelsized.
Jun 07, 2017 for my client base, which includes experienced consultants, coaches, and speakers who selfpublish, i find a nice book length is somewhere in the 40,000 to 70,000word range, which is 160280 pages. The answer is that there is not a fixed length or a precise word count you should follow when creating chapters for your book. Some will tell you 2,500 words is the average, while others will say that 3,000 to 5,000 word chapters are more likely to be the norm. Since 2011, the average length of a bestseller has dropped steadily from year to year. The average chapter length in my book is roughly nine pages. In 2011, the lists average length peaked at 467 pages.
For conveniences sake, i usually treat each scene in the outline as a chapter although, remember, chapter divisions are arbitrary. What is the average chapter length in a young adult novel. Try it on some books with chapter lengths you like, and dont be surprised if it varies considerably. Well, youll put the book down when you get to the end of this chapter, you reason. They can vary in length between just a couple of pages and 50 or 60. Picture books youll hear many people say the shorter the better. But i dont like to do things halfheartedly, so here is the bigger picture of length in fiction a novel is anything over 50,000 words.
I have rounded the averages down slightly, both to account for twilights outlier status and my own preference for brevity. It makes quite a difference whether you want to publish a childrens picture book, a 50recipe smoothie book, a science fiction novel or a technical encyclopedia. Literary agent danielle zigner takes a look at typical novel lengths per genre and what appeals to publishers within the current marketplace. Your target audience for these is kids ages 4 to 8. Readers love to feel at home with their favorite authors, and though they may not be cognizant of things like chapter length, they will notice the difference in how a book feels when they read it. Within the publishing industry we tend to talk about the length of a book. You shouldnt set manuscript guidelines for yourself on chapter length. Amazon ebook page length by genre kindle page length. How many pages of an actual book does one chapter of a manga.
New writers tend to assume that a chapter must be a certain set length in order to maintain the average novel length of around 80,000 95,000 words, but in truth, chapters can be as long or as short as you need them to be. So childrens book manuscript chapter length is a big question that ive received many times about all sorts of childrens books that have chapters. The average fiction book is about 80,000 to 100,000 words, which is about 246 to 307 ebook pages. On average, how long is a childrens book for children. Every category will have an average length, including childrens books, young adult, business books, etc. The lengths vary hugely from title to title, but chapters released weekly seem to average 1620 pages while chapters released monthly average 36 50 pages. Any selfhelp or motivational nonfiction book should be between 30,000 and 70,000 words. A statistical analysis of robert jordans the wheel of. Lengthy chapters can make readers want to give up on reading a story.
Long enough to feel substantial, short enough not to intimidate potential readers. When im dividing my manuscript into chapters, how long should each chapter be. Most nonfiction books have between 5 and 20 chapters. It contains 38 lines per page, with an average of 12 words per line, thus 456 words per book page. Before diving into the specifics of genrebased word counts, lets look at the broader picture of average book length. Your chapter length has to work well with the overall word count of the book short chapters create an even distribution of both content and action. You should be fine, but it wouldnt hurt to get it closer to 70k. However, many authors, frustrated with the low price of ebooks, have taken to writing ebooks that are between 40,000 and 50,000. In fact, the majority of printed books are turned into ebooks. Within the publishing industry we tend to talk about the length of a book in words rather than in pages.
Jun 05, 2017 so childrens book manuscript chapter length is a big question that ive received many times about all sorts of childrens books that have chapters. You can fight that with short chapters that keep the readers attention and maintain a fast pace, but that can also be confusing to the reader. Check out similar books that are on the market to see if there seems to be any consensus on chapter length. How to write early readers, easy chapter books, and.
You dont have to pick a number like 80,000 and then divide it by 30 chapters to give you 2500. The graph shows the average length of the top 100 bestsellers in each of the 30 main amazon kindle categories, measured in terms of the number of pages. Jun 03, 2009 like with a first novel, you are going to discover so much in the writing process. If you self pub, places such as amazon will print a book as low as 24 pages, so if your poetry is an epic poem it can be almost 1. While many authors keep the chapters around the same length, it doesnt mean that you cant have a 20 page chapter right next to a 10 page chapter. It should be enough to communicate your message effectively. Since pattersons chapters are short, averaging about 600 to 700 words, even one paragraph of chapter summary composes a significant amount of the book. For this reason, its not surprising that aspiring authors have questions about the appropriate length of a manuscript.