What is the purpose of having chapters in your novel? According to NY Book Editors, chapters (also called chapter breaks) give your reader “a mental respite” and “allow the reader to digest everything that’s happened within that section.” Since there are varying ranges when it comes to the number of words in a novel (depending on the genre) it’s also expected that novel chapters would have no stringent rules when it comes to word count. Now that we’ve covered how many words are in a novel, it’s time to break it down even further by finding out the ideal number of chapters in a novel and how many words are used in a typical chapter.ĭepending on the writing genre, word count in book chapters can vary considerably.Īs previously discussed, there are different requirements for both fiction and non-fiction genres. I would suggest looking for books that run between about 60 and 120 pages of normal type, not including introductions and notes.Blog How Many Words are in a Novel Chapter? Nickee de Leon Huld 5 mins If this list is to be useful it needs pruning. Anything under 40 pages is a short story. Anything over that is definitely a novel. Perhaps that's one reason why Orwell called it 'a fairy tale'?Īs a rule of thumb, then, anything that runs over 120 pages in a normal paperback edition is pushing the limits of the novella but will probably squeak by so long as it stays under 150 pages or 60,000 words. Animal Farm is a good example - too long to be a short story, too short to be a novel. I read about 40 pages per hour, and I think of a novella as something that will take me two to three hours to read without rushing. Some of Amelie Nothomb's novels, for example, are so short that we would probably call them short stories. Obviously this is subjective: the French regularly publish as novels ( romans) books that in the Anglo-American world would be seen as too short for solo publication. Two or three novellas might be published together as a standard-sized book. A novella is substantially shorter, but long enough to be clearly not a short story. This gives a final printed size around 200-250 pages. Novels are usually printed around 350-400 words per page, and a novel of publishable length is usually around 80-100,000 words. Half of the books on this list are novels, not novellas. Elsewhere, it retains its original, derogatory meaning of a novel of a light, romantic, or sentimental character.) Certainly, the 'novelette' has not been accepted as a distinct form outside genre fiction. There is some question as to whether the appearance of the novelette as a separate formal category is simply a commercially-driven attempt to subdivide the traditional short story category for competition purposes: works of this 'novelette' length have been described elsewhere as long short stories. It seems to have had its origins as an accepted subcategory at the 1955 Hugo Awards, where it designated a work of "between 7,500 and 17,500 words". (Note: The situation has been complicated by the use of the term 'novelette' to describe a work intermediate between the long short story and the novella. The vagueness of the description may be seen from the definition offered by Wikipedia, below.įrom Wikipedia: A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative normally longer than a short story but shorter than a novel.
The distinctions between a novella and a short novel, and between a novella and a long short story, are not absolutely clear: but, in general, the novella is of such a length that, published together, no more than four novellas would make a single novel-length book. These boundaries are approximate, as there is no generally agreed definition of a novella other than that it is of intermediate length.
A novella is a fictional prose narrative, as a rule of thumb more than 20,000 but fewer than 50,000 words in length.