How many words in a book?

[Jdvn1]

I don't think you should shoot for a number. Write what's comfortable. If it's a novella, it's a novella. If it's a novel, it's a novel. Write your story as it should be told.

 

[Desdichado]

I don't think you should shoot for a number. Write what's comfortable. If it's a novella, it's a novella. If it's a novel, it's a novel. Write your story as it should be told.

I'm not really shooting for anything, I'm just curious.

I might shoot later, of course. But I've been saying that for twenty years, so don't hold your breath.

 

[Angcuru]

Word count is nothing. Entertainment value is everything.

 

[mojo1701]

Word count is nothing. Entertainment value is everything.

Would you want a good book to be only 50 pages?

 

[drothgery]

Would you want a good book to be only 50 pages?

No. But a good book could have half a dozen 50 page novellas, and that would be fine. Also, padding a story beyond its length doesn't do wonders for the results.

 

[Arbiter of Wyrms]

Would you want a good book to be only 50 pages?

Some of my all-time favorite stories are less than a dozen pages. Off the top of my head, I can think of:
Swift: A Modest Proposal
Card: A Plague of Butterflies
Dahl: Lamb to the Slaughter

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

Back at HarperCollins, our boilerplate contract used to state that an author would deliver a novel with a wordcount of between 120,00-180,000 words, which comes out to approx. 250-350 pages for a typical novel. But we always modified the word count, as any given author would vary greatly from book to book. And word count has almost nothing to do with page count. that is almost entirely dependant on the layout & design of the book. We used to specify on the production sheets that a novel was to be 300 (or whatever # we wanted) pages in length, and then the designer would layout the book to fit that, adjusting font, font size, margins, white space, headers/footers, chapter heads, etc to meet the page count we needed. There are all sorts of tricks you can use to adjust the page count of a book, and the reader hardly ever notices. Then you get into paper thickness and weight, and you can make a 250 page book thicker than a 400 page book...

 

[mojo1701]

Back at HarperCollins, our boilerplate contract used to state that an author would deliver a novel with a wordcount of between 120,00-180,000 words, which comes out to approx. 250-350 pages for a typical novel. But we always modified the word count, as any given author would vary greatly from book to book. And word count has almost nothing to do with page count. that is almost entirely dependant on the layout & design of the book. We used to specify on the production sheets that a novel was to be 300 (or whatever # we wanted) pages in length, and then the designer would layout the book to fit that, adjusting font, font size, margins, white space, headers/footers, chapter heads, etc to meet the page count we needed. There are all sorts of tricks you can use to adjust the page count of a book, and the reader hardly ever notices. Then you get into paper thickness and weight, and you can make a 250 page book thicker than a 400 page book...

I usually use those for essays.

 

[Psionicist]

Take a book you like and use it as reference. Count the words on one page, and multiply by number of pages. There you have it.

 

[Jdvn1]

Some of my all-time favorite stories are less than a dozen pages. Off the top of my head, I can think of:
Swift: A Modest Proposal
Card: A Plague of Butterflies
Dahl: Lamb to the Slaughter

Ooh, and most stuff by Poe.