Is 68K Words Too Short for a Literary Novel?

[Brian Thomas Clark]

I've read many different opinions on this, and I do know that, as with all writing, Content is the king, but is it just too short?

Just looking for some more input.

[James81]

No.

[timewaster]

I've read many different opinions on this, and I do know that, as with all writing, Content is the king, but is it just too short?

Just looking for some more input.

Probably.

[IceCreamEmpress]

It's a bit on the short side, at least by US standards. But it's not out of the ballpark by any means.

[Birol]

It's on the short side, but I've read and studied shorter.

[Brian Thomas Clark]

Wow, that was fast. A "No" and two "Probably"s. I suppose I should also mention that the first draft was about 80K, and I wanted to take out 10% without sacrificing any story. So that's what I did.

anyway, thanks everyone!

[James D. Macdonald]

The closer you are to the ends of the bell curve the greater your genius must be.

[Gillhoughly]

According to SFWA:

Novel: a work of 40,000 words or more
Novella: 17,500 -40,000 words
Novelette: 7,500 - 17,500 words
Short story: 7,500 words or less

You're in the ballpark.

Get feedback from beta readers, edit, re-edit, polish, re-edit, start subbing.

Write the NEXT one.

[RobJ]

According to SFWA:

Novel: a work of 40,000 words or more
Novella: 17,500 -40,000 words
Novelette: 7,500 - 17,500 words
Short story: 7,500 words or less

You're in the ballpark.
Although to be fair, the SFWA isn't the most obvious place to go for an answer about literary novels.

Cheers,
Rob

[CaroGirl]

Although to be fair, the SFWA isn't the most obvious place to go for an answer about literary novels.

Cheers,
Rob
Perhaps not, but literary novels are often as short as the OPs. Not to worry. The length is fine.

[James81]

Wow, that was fast. A "No" and two "Probably"s. I suppose I should also mention that the first draft was about 80K, and I wanted to take out 10% without sacrificing any story. So that's what I did.

anyway, thanks everyone!

Look at it this way...

They say that the average printed novel will have rougly 250 words per page.

If you divide 68k by 250, that yields 272 pages.

I know of many literary novels that are much shorter than that.

Even if you bump up the 250 words per page to 300 words per page, that's STILL 227 pages.

Not too short by any means.

[James81]

The important thing to remember, though, is that your story is finished and has been revised once, and in that revision you CUT the word count down by 10K words.

That means that, despite what your final word count is, you shouldn't worry so much about the 80K mark. Because in doing so you are only going to be adding fluff and weakening your story.

[allenparker]

Pick out three of the best publishers in your genre. Look at their criteria on word count. If you are in their range, don't worry anymore. If you are not, but the story is perfect as it is, don't worry anymore about it. If the count is out of range, the story could use a bit of fixing, fix it and don't worry anymore.


Best advice, don't take any of this too seriously. Learn what you can and write the best story and submit.

Chances are, you will find a publisher somewhere.

[Henri Bauholz]

No.

[eyeblink]

Look at it this way...

They say that the average printed novel will have rougly 250 words per page.

If you divide 68k by 250, that yields 272 pages.

I know of many literary novels that are much shorter than that.

Even if you bump up the 250 words per page to 300 words per page, that's STILL 227 pages.

Not too short by any means.

250 words per page is MS format, not printed book format. A normally-typeset adult novel (in the UK at least) is about 320-350 words a page, sometimes more. Children's and YA novels are often in a larger font, so fewer words a page.

Outside genre fiction, wordcounts of 70k and under are not unheard of. Jennifer Johnston (a favourite writer of mine) almost never goes over 60k. An admittedly more extreme recent example is Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach - 38k, though that's really a novella.

If you think about it, the selling point of literary fiction is the quality and style of the writing, the writer's voice, rather than delivering the required elements of a particular genre - or expanding or cutting the MSS to fit the genre's length requirements (within reason).

So I'd say that 60k is probably fine - as long as (as always) the writing is as good as it can be and the novel is neither bloated nor underdeveloped. I'd say the writing needs to be MORE than "as good as it can be", it needs that indefinable extra something (that you know when you see it) to fly as a literary novel.

(This is not to say that genre novels don't have to be well written or to have that extra something or a distinctive writer's voice. And there are plenty of novels passed off as literary which are vapid pretentious crap.)

[James81]

250 words per page is MS format, not printed book format. A normally-typeset adult novel (in the UK at least) is about 320-350 words a page, sometimes more. Children's and YA novels are often in a larger font, so fewer words a page.



Even at 350 words per page, that's still 194 pages, which is a LITTLE short, but not completely ridiculously unheard of at all.

Another 2000 words would put you at the 200 page mark (which is pretty much where I imagine most literary books to be "above").

[James81]

An interesting thing I just did:

80,000 / 350 = 229 pages

Plus, you gotta figure in that for each chapter you are going to have white space on 2 pages (one where the previous chapter ends, the other where the new chapter begins).

[JrFFKacy]

I'd rather read a fantastic short book than a slow, sloppy long one.

[eyeblink]

Even at 350 words per page, that's still 194 pages, which is a LITTLE short, but not completely ridiculously unheard of at all.

Another 2000 words would put you at the 200 page mark (which is pretty much where I imagine most literary books to be "above").

They'd probably do something with the typesetting (slightly smaller font, narrower margins, starting new chapters on the same page instead of a new one etc etc) to bring that down to 192 pages. Multiples of 16 and 32 are economical pagecounts, because of the way books are bound (in sections of 16 if I remember rightly).

On the other hand, I've seen a tendency to make books look far longer than they actually are through typesetting - Jenny Downham's Before I Die is 69k, but the UK paperback runs to 336 pages. My US paperback copy of Scott Westerfeld's The Secret Hour (first of the Midnighters trilogy) runs to 400 pages and has a wordcount of 65k!