I was wondering how long peoples novels are in terms of number of words. I have tried to do some research into how many words I should be aiming for but there seems to be a lot of disagreement about how long they should be! Some people suggest 60,000 -70,000 and others suggest 100,000 - 150,000.
How long are your pieces? It would be interesting to know what I should be aiming for.
I want to just keep writing my novel until I feel that the story has been told and then either pad it out in places or remove some words but it would be interesting to know whether any of you have written towards a 'goal' of a certain number of words or whether you just write and write until you feel that the story has come to its natural end.
Word count is dependent on genre. For most adult genres, keep under 100K.
This is a list by former agent Colleen Lindsay (who is American):
http://theswivet.blogspot.ie/2008/03/on-word-counts-and-novel-length.html
Hi All,
I have been told. For a first time author you should stick to around 80,000 words.
Why I ask?
Anything over that puts agents and publishers off. Jacob Jones and the order of seven weighed in at 74,000. Of course, there are exceptions to all rules.
JK Rowling does not need to worry about the size of books she needs to write, not now anyway. However, if you look back to the first few books in the Harry Potter series you will see they were all at about the 75,000 to 80,000 word length. The last four books, however, were between 165,000 and 250,000 words! When you become famous, you get to decide how long your books are. Until that point, I would stick to the rules.
I think that all the above are wise.
I also think that word count targets are only seriously relevent to short stories. For long works good editing is far more important. Guidance from an appropriate professional is essential. I know that I completely miss holes in my work and can't bear to lose parts that I should really dump as fast as possible.. I could say "I need help!" It's also extremely difficult to pick out slip ups and gaps in one's own work so that getting someone else to look at it is a real help.
(I am also using far to many "I"s... ;-)
David