Genre and Length

One of the most common questions I get is about how long a novel should be. The answer, of course, is that a novel should be as long as it needs to be. If it takes you 70,000 words to tell the story, then that’s how long the novel should be. If it takes you 210,000 words to tell the story, then that’s how long the novel should be. That fairly trite answer aside, a factor you might want to take into account is what genre you’re writing in.

Simply put, different genres tend to have different appro...