In the world of indie publishing, where readers overwhelmingly buy ebooks, the distinction between a novel and novella, for example, is less crucial. For this reason, authors with traditional publishing aspirations are often discouraged from putting all their eggs in the novella basket. The exception, of course, would be those written by established writers with an existing readership. This (combined with the fact that a 30,000-word book and an 80,000-word one cost roughly the same to edit, design, and market) means that editors at major presses are generally reluctant to take on novellas - and even less likely to seek out novelettes. Novellas are usually sold at a lower price point than novels. After all, they have a limited number of pages for each issue (and their editors only have so many hours in the week to edit manuscripts). For example, literary magazines typically have strict limits to the length of short stories they will print. In writing a story, recommended word counts only really come into play when you’re weighing up your publishing options.

There are 150,000-word epics that readers will effortlessly breeze through, and we’ve certainly read our fair share of short stories that seemingly drag on forever. ‘Too long’ and ‘too short’ are rarely criticisms of a story's length but a comment on how well-written the piece is. But if all you're after is a quick answer, here they are: In this post, we’ll show you how long a novella, novelette, and short story are - and reveal the word counts for popular examples of all three. But with novellas, novelettes, short stories, word counts are crucial as they’re the only defining features of these formats. Those averages are a reflection of publishing norms rather than any hard-and-fast rule. In book publishing, the average length of a novel will be influenced by its genre (sci-fi epics are much longer than romance novels, for example).

Word counter books