What Do You Aim for and Include in Word Counts? An Odd Controversy

May I please ask for opinions and assistance in regards to novel word counts? This is a topic which affects us all and the feedback may also be helpful for you.

When I started writing the first book of The Chronicles of Mirchar, The Dragon Tree, I checked out acceptable word counts. 50,000 and up was a novel; under that were novellas etc. As NaNoWriMo shoots for 50,000 I accepted that as my goal and have happily surpassed it. One of my favourite books, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is 50,000 and so is The Great Gatsby: no concerns there. Publishers had accepted those books and they were hits.

I got to 56,000 words (story only) and felt fine. As I am world building, there is a four page glossary and an Author’s note at the front, both of which are necessary. So I started searching for what actually got included in word count, just out of interest. I opened a can of worms. Reputable web sites were screaming at me, that absolutely no publisher would take a novel under 80,000 words – no way! Apparently Of Mice and Men was a novella, so that rule cannot be set in stone. There was an Austen book that was novella sized too. (See below for the official take on what genre word counts are expected to be.)

Then the debate got deeper. Author blogs started to talk about the great quantity versus quality debate; the Indie decision versus the traditional publishing route debate; the differences in expectations and differing standards between the different genres. My 2.30am this morning, my head was spinning and I was freaking out a bit. I have a second novel planned, I could merge them… but… I have the correct story arc, the novel makes sense without padding which would be redundant. So why should I slave over 30,000 more words?

I think I know what I want to do, but I am very interested in hearing your opinions. How many words minimum are acceptable to you? Do you pad your work out to hit the 80,000, or how do you handle it?

Also: what do you include in the word count. NaNoWriMo accepts Table of Contents, Chapter Headings and Copyright as inclusions. I don’t think they should be included. I would love to hear your say. If you’re feeling confused, maybe we can help each other.

 

A great blog post which goes into this in depth, comes from **The Swivet:

To quote Colleen Lindsay’s post in part:

middle grade fiction = Anywhere from 25k to 40k, with the average at 35k

YA fiction = For mainstream YA, anywhere from about 45k to 80k;

paranormal romance = 85k to 100k

romance = 85k to 100k

category romance = 55k to 75k

cozy mysteries = 65k to 90k

horror = 80k to 100k

western = 80k to 100k

science fiction and fantasy per sub genre

—> hard sf = 90k to 110k

—> space opera = 90k to 120k

—> epic/high/traditional/historical fantasy = 90k to 120k

—> contemporary fantasy = 90k to 100k

—> romantic SF = 85k to 100k

—> urban fantasy = 90k to 100k

—> new weird = 85k to 110k

—> slipstream = 80k to 100k

—> comic fantasy = 80k to 100k

—> everything else = 90k to 100k

**The Swivet is maintained by Colleen Lindsay, Associate Director Marketing, Social Media and Reader Experience at the NAL/Berkley Publishing Groups, divisions of Penguin Group (USA).

 

This blog post by Cate Russell-Cole is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You are free to share and adapt it. 

You may need Colleen’s permission to use her part, but from what I have seen, this is public information anyway.

Filed under: What's On Tagged: author, books, challenge, Indie publishing, novel, problem solving, support, word count, writer, writing