How long should each chapter be?

by June Liggins
30th May 2014

I imagine this question has been asked on here before, I may have even read an answer to it but I can't remember!! If someone could just give me a clue about how long the average chapter in the average novel should be, thanks!

Replies

When I searched, 250-300 words per page is what I found in most of the articles or blogs. But you may also go through these links, there are several other things you may need to know other than the word count only.

http://www.writersservices.com/writersservices-self-publishing/word-count-page

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/word-count-and-book-length/

http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/guide-to-literary-agents/word-count-for-novels-and-childrens-books-the-definitive-post

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Ashwerya
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Ashwerya T
31/05/2014

If you work on 300 words to the page as a rough guide you won't go far wrong ie. ten pages to the average chapter. You can only work on what you're writing on now (I suspect most people use A4 and 12 point font, single spaced) because printed pages vary so much n size, margin width etc

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Jonathan
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Jonathan Hopkins
30/05/2014

I'm working on a children's book aimed at 10-12 year-olds. To work out how long I should make the chapters I pulled a few books off the shelves and counted the words. Actually, I estimated, by counting the number of words per line a few times, getting an average and multiplying by the number of lines. Chapters for middle grade are about 2000 words.

You could do the same for adult contemporary novels (but I bet someone somewhere will have already done so, and an internet search engine will find it for you).

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Katy W
30/05/2014