Dear Julie: Word count
By: Julie Cohen
Tags: Writing Advice, Chapter Length, Word Count, Writing, Writing Tips

Dear Julie: Word count

How long should my book be?

Photo by Diane Alkier on Unsplash

Dear Julie, I need help with length and structure! How many words should my manuscript be? It’s a women’s fiction book with a dash of romance. How many words should I be aiming for total? How many words per chapter? How many chapters? So many questions! Sarah

Dear Sarah,

The answer to so many writing questions is so often ‘Well, it depends.’ It’s nice to have a question with a definite answer, for once.

Well, almost definite.

The length of most mainstream print-published women’s commercial fiction novels is between 80,000 and 100,000 words. Occasionally you might see a longer one; very rarely a shorter. Historical novels tend to be on the long side and romcoms tend to be on the short side. If you aim for about 90,000 words you won’t go far wrong, and you’ll have room to expand or cut, as is necessary. Maybe even both.

Digital-first publishers and self-published writers may have books which are shorter than this. The guidelines here are much more fluid, maybe because a book that would look frustratingly slim on a physical shelf actually looks like a perfect short read on an e-reader. You can check the publisher’s requirements. I’d say that 50–60,000 words is minimum for a short novel — any shorter would be a novella. But individual publishers may have their own word count guidelines.

As far as chapter length and number of chapters goes: this is really up to you. In my mind, a chapter should feel like a rounded unit, but it should also leave enough hanging so that the reader gets to the end and wants to keep reading. A chapter should be, in my opinion, about as long as it needs to be. If a chapter feels too long to you and there’s a good place to break it, go ahead; on the other hand, if it feels too short and you like how it combines with another chapter, go ahead and put them together.

Shorter chapters sometimes feel more pacey, and make the book read faster; longer ones might be more contemplative. I think the shortest chapter I’ve ever written in one of my books was one sentence long. Stephenie Meyer had a chapter that consisted of only blank pages. But that’s not a trick you want to pull too often. Mostly you want…I’m guessing between five and twenty pages as a rough guideline? You can vary chapter length within the book; sometimes it’s nice to have a short chapter after a long one, to give the reader a little break. But it’s not necessary.

The only rule is that whenever you can, you should end a chapter in a way that makes the reader think: ‘Oh, I’ll just read one more.’ And begin the next in a way that makes the reader glad that they kept going.

Mostly though Sarah, this is the answer: let the length of your chapters, and the length of your novel, serve your story. Worry about it a bit, as a general guideline, but don’t worry about it like crazy. Don’t use word count as a whip or as an immovable target or limit. Don’t think that just because you’ve got to 90k words that you have to be finished, if you haven’t wrapped things up yet. A first draft should generally be as long as it has to be. You can cut, or add, in revisions. And as always, if the story is good enough, it can break every rule.

So I guess once again the answer is…Well, it depends?

Love

Julie x