Word Count by Genre: How Long Should Your Book Be?

Most genre charts put an adult novel somewhere between 70,000 and 120,000 words. Romance, mystery and thriller tend to sit at the lower end of that range, while fantasy can go well past 100,000 words.

For shorter fiction, the clearest definitions come from the science fiction awards. They call anything under 7,500 words a short story, 7,500 to 17,500 a novelette, 17,500 to 40,000 a novella, and anything longer a novel.

I wanted to know how well real books fit these numbers, so I counted 13 of them from the public-domain texts on Project Gutenberg. The first surprise came early. The Great Gatsby has 48,126 words, which puts it below the 50,000-word minimum that one of the best-known charts gives for literary fiction.

Word count by genre: the chart

If you search for word counts by genre, two guides keep turning up. One is from The Novelry and is dated August 2023. The other is from selfpublishing.com and was published in July 2026. I have put their numbers side by side.

For most genres the two guides are close. Fantasy is where they differ most. The Novelry treats 150,000 words as an “absolute maximum” and calls 120,000 ideal, whereas selfpublishing.com goes up to 200,000 but tells debut authors to “stay under 140,000”. If this is your first fantasy novel, somewhere around 120,000 to 140,000 words is a sensible ceiling.

Romance shows a smaller gap with bigger consequences. A 55,000-word romance is fine by one guide and 15,000 words too short by the other, so in that genre I would look up the guidelines of the specific publisher or agent first.

If you just need a target, aim for the middle of the range. A 90,000-word science fiction novel or an 80,000-word thriller would fit both guides. Neither of them explains where its numbers come from, though, so I read them as industry experience rather than statistics.

How many pages is that?

Agents and editors still talk about standard manuscript pages of 250 words each, and The Novelry uses the same figure. Printed pages depend on the layout. On a 6 by 9 inch page in 11 point type, I measured about 456 words with a tight layout and about 275 with an open one. The details are in the article on words per page.

For an 80,000-word novel, that works out as follows:

1. Manuscript pages: 320.

2. Printed pages: 176 with a tight layout or 291 with an open one, plus front matter and chapter openings.

3. Time: 32 weeks of drafting at 500 words a day, five days a week. The writing goal calculator can do the same sum for your own deadline.

Whether you should count words at all, or hours or pages instead, depends on what stage your project is in. I compared the three in words, hours or pages, and how many words a day looks at what a realistic daily target is.

Short story, novelette, novella, novel

The genre charts are advice. The only common definitions that someone actually enforces come from two science fiction awards, and they are worth knowing even if you never write science fiction.

According to the Hugo Award categories, a short story has “less than seven thousand five hundred (7,500) words” and a novel has “forty thousand (40,000) words or more”. The novelette and the novella fill the space in between, split at 17,500 words. The Nebula rules use exactly the same limits.

There is one difference that is easy to miss. The WSFS Constitution, which governs the Hugos, lets the organisers move a story into another category if its length is “within twenty percent (20%) of the new category limits”. The Nebulas have no such margin and leave doubtful cases to an awards commissioner.

I only noticed how much that margin matters once I had the numbers in front of me. The Turn of the Screw has 42,234 words, which makes it a novel, but it is close enough to 40,000 that the Hugo organisers could treat it as a novella. Heart of Darkness, with 37,906 words, could move in the opposite direction. Gatsby misses the window by 126 words, because the 20 percent margin above 40,000 ends at 48,000.

Other places where length is a hard limit

Awards are not the only place where a word count can get a story turned away. Three other limits apply no matter what genre you write in.

Magazines. Short fiction magazines list their limits in their submission guidelines, and most of them mean it. Strange Horizons takes stories of up to 5,000 words and calls that “a firm limit”. Clarkesworld accepts 1,000 to 22,000 words at 14 cents a word. Asimov’s Science Fiction pays 8 to 10 cents a word for the first 7,500 words and 8 cents for each word after that, so a longer story earns less per word.

Print on demand. Amazon’s paperback guidelines set a minimum of 24 pages. For a 6 by 9 inch book printed in black ink on white paper, the maximum is 828 pages, while cream paper allows 776 and standard colour printing 600. Moby-Dick with an open layout would need 772 pages, so it would still just fit on cream paper. Middlemarch fits into a single paperback only with a tight layout, at 694 pages.

Book statistics. In 1964 UNESCO’s recommendation on book production statistics defined a book as a printed publication “of at least 49 pages, exclusive of the cover pages”. Anything from 5 to 48 pages counts as a pamphlet. Printed on its own with an open layout, The Yellow Wallpaper would fill only 23 pages, so for the statisticians it would be a pamphlet rather than a book.

How long are famous books?

These are the 13 books I counted. The last column shows where each one would land under the Hugo and Nebula rules, without any of the 20 percent moves described above.

Most of the novels would have trouble with a modern chart. Pride and Prejudice runs more than 30,000 words past the top of either romance range, and Dracula is about 60,000 words over the horror maximum. Frankenstein is the only novel in the list that sits comfortably inside a current range.

The novellas tell a tidier story. The four books most readers would call novellas have between 21,934 and 37,906 words, well inside the award range of 17,500 to 40,000. For short fiction, the award definitions describe what people mean by the word surprisingly well.

What happens in translation

Translation changes word counts, and the Nebula rules say so directly: “Word counts for translated works shall be based on the English word count.” The WSFS Constitution even allows the Hugo organisers to set their own conversion ratio for other languages. To see how large the effect is, I compared six German books with their English translations.

Five of the six translations are 9 to 16 percent longer than the original. German tends to build long compound nouns where English uses two or three separate words, which is the usual explanation. The English Buddenbrooks is the one exception and comes out slightly shorter, which says more about the translator than about either language.

My first count of Immensee made the English version look 22 percent longer. The Gutenberg file of the translation includes the translator’s preface and an introduction, and once I took those out, the difference dropped to 16 percent.

The difference can be enough to change a book’s category. Theodor Storm’s The Rider on the White Horse has 38,174 words in German, which would make it a novella. Going by the five longer translations, an English version should land somewhere between about 41,700 and 44,500 words, and the award rules would then count it as a novel.

When the charts don’t apply

The charts are built around a single adult novel that will be printed and sold through bookshops. They help much less in other cases:

• Picture books are planned around a fixed number of printed pages, and the text has to fit into them.

• Series work best when the books have a similar length, and readers notice that more than any genre average.

• Non-fiction with images, tables and notes needs fewer words to fill the same number of pages.

• Ebooks have no fixed pages, so the print limits above do not apply.

If you are querying agents with a first novel, though, the charts are worth taking seriously, because they reflect what agents and publishers are buying at the moment. Before you send anything, check the agency’s own submission page. If it gives a range, that range matters more than any chart.

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