When it gets into the 80s, you may be all right—but you have to have a reason for going that high. Instead, you'll get to focus solely on completing your novel. So, I did the math. The standard is text for 32 pages. Word Counts of the Most Popular Books in the World. Date August 3, 2017. When writing a longer book that is aimed at 12-year-olds (and could maybe be considered "tween"), using the term "upper middle grade" is advisable. Word count is something I don't think about too often until I travel to a writers' conference, and then someone asks a simple, innocent question and a firestorm follows. After JK made the publishing house oodles and oodles of money, she could do whatever she wanted. Most novels published today run anywhere from 60,000 to 200,000 words. Memoir is the same as a novel and that means you're aiming for 80,000-89,999. If you’re a big reader then you’ve probably read a mixture of very short and very long books in your lifetime. The word per page count has gone up some since then, but only by happenstance as I stopped using line breaks to denote the passage of time…and it will go up slightly more when I go back and remove the one I used prior to that. Fantasy readers usually expect all their books to be epic. 70-75K is not bad at all. As an example, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James is 42,211 words long. In short: 80,000 - 89,999: Totally cool 90,000 - 99,999: Generally safe 70,000 - 79,999: Might be too short; probably all right 100,000 - 109,999: Might be too long; probably all right Below 70,000: Too short 110,000 or above Too long. Commonly, longer novellas are referred to as novels; Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) are sometimes called novels,[by whom?] Really puts the novel I’m currently writing into perspective. That said, try to keep it in the ideal range. The most important thing here is to realize that there are always exceptions to these rules. A lot yes, but I’d have 10x that if I wrote everything I’d come up with along the way. However, if there is one thing I remember from when my wife dragged me kicking and screaming to He's Just Not That Into You, it's that you cannot count on being the exception; you must count on being the rule. [5] The novella is a common literary genre in several European languages. One thing that seems to connect all books considered ‘literary’ is that they are all considered to be intelligently written. The number of pages changes depending on the number of words, the font and the font size. Usage of the more italianate novella in English seems to be a bit younger.