How many words should a fantasy novel be? That lets me add some extraneous backstory without being too pedestrian while following the familiar three-act trilogy. No matter how you’ve mapped them out, or filled notebooks with their backstories, you don’t really get a sense of the real thing until you start telling their stories in real time. If there are Fairy Frogs it sounds like a fantasy! By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy. how long popular published fantasy novels are. It`s really a great help. it really makes a difference. Particularly with Mists of Avalon – I saw 416K and thought “surely that can’t be right?” then went and grabbed my copy… and yeah, it’s pretty huge. And as for when I write… I’m gonna be a bit controversial/blunt and say I ignore the rules- because to be totally cliché “how long is a piece of string”- if the story ends before I get to 80000 words then the story ends… and if it goes over 150k… ok it’s never gonna go over 150k- that’s really not my style Plus, like you said, it also depends on the type of fantasy (ie whether it’s YA or epic etc) Anyway- this was such a comprehensive piece and really well researched!! My manuscript was a 140,000-word YA fantasy. This is my debut novel, as I had only ever written poetry before, and short excerpts for my own purpose. Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (published in 1993) runs to a whopping 1349 pages, with a word count of 591, 552 words. As Lit Rejections cautions, this makes it ‘easier for a literary agent to reject than accept’. I love the level of detail!! If you want to write a novel that could be submitted for awards (such as the Nebula) or to a specific publishing house you need to find out any word count requirements first. The exceptions are usually authors who’ve already had an established track record of sales with previous – shorter – books, like George R.R. This post on Fantasy Author’s Handbook does point out that many of the bestselling books of all time (of which many are fantasy novels) are not the 200,000 word epics many associate with the genre. Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children (which won a Booker Prize and the prestigious ‘Booker of Bookers’) is a much longer 208, 773 words. Yes true Discworld is more comic fantasy and isn’t really your traditional ‘epic’ fantasy (I just tend to just use ‘epic fantasy’ generally to refer to non-real-world type fantasy… ‘high fantasy’ would probably more accurately reflect what I mean), so if you’re not attempting a Tolkien-style epic then word count matters even less! rev 2020.9.25.37676, The best answers are voted up and rise to the top, Writing Stack Exchange works best with JavaScript enabled, Start here for a quick overview of the site, Detailed answers to any questions you might have, Discuss the workings and policies of this site, Learn more about Stack Overflow the company, Learn more about hiring developers or posting ads with us.