So, whats the sweet spot for an average chapters word count and. You can have two chapters or 200 it all depends on how comfortable you are with experimenting. Most novels have between 10 to 12 chapters, but thats not set in stone. In short, the story should dictate the length of your chapters and, consequently, the length of the novel itself. The total page count excluding appendices and index is 204 pages, thus about 93,000 words. If you do not use a lot of sidebars, bulleted and numbered lists, and boxed texts, your reader may be daunted by how long a chapter iseven if you have headers every few pages. They can vary in length between just a couple of pages and 50 or 60. It contains 38 lines per page, with an average of 12 words per line, thus 456 words per book page.
Estimate your page count book designer linda parke. Generally a novel for adult reading would have about 20 pages per chapter on average. Page number is a terrible way to estimate word count as it depends on the size of the pages, the font size, the font used spacing, leading etc. There are no hardandfast rules on how long or short a chapter needs to be. So childrens book manuscript chapter length is a big question that ive received many times about all sorts of childrens books that have chapters. Some novels contain 50 or more and some extremely rarely contain none. The average fiction book is about 80,000 to 100,000 words, which is about 246 to 307 ebook pages.
The figure was found through looking at a number of books text stats, until brave new worlds 64,531 word count landed in the exact center of all books50% of books have fewer words and 50% of books have more words. The average chapter length in my book is roughly nine pages. Depending on your genre, having too many or too little can not only hurt your book sales. Book page count calculator how many pages is my novel. Will the chapter breaks make sense to that reader or will it be a disruption from the story. If im writing a novel, this gives me 40 chapters and 70,000 words when im done. There are plenty of books that purposefully play with the word counts of their chapters. As a general guideline, chapters should be between 3,000 to 5,000 words. I hope this information has helped you gain clarity about your book. Do the number of pages in an ebook differ from the number. Since opinions vary greatly, i did some research to verify the numbers in my head. The ideal number of chapters a novel should contain. Incidentally, you have probably already divided your novel into chapters using your instincts. But again as a surprise to me, dune was a close second, averaging just 3,800 words per chapter.
What is the average number of pages in a chapter answers. Im writing a book too, and my chapters average at about 2 pages. Before we go any further, stop thinking about pages. If your novel is targeted at a younger audience, then 10 pages per chapter would be better, on average. I wrote a book actually, many books, then found a guide called jeff hermans guide. It only takes a quick scan of a handful of ebooks, say in the kindle store, to notice that the number of pages that constitutes an ebook is almost as wide as the pacific. Memoirs usually fall in the range of 70,000 to 90, 000 words. The bestselling creativity guide which i edited, the artists way, is one of the shining examples of this wide format book. Twelve to sixteen pivots makes for a dynamic dramatic structure. Many people read in spurts, at lunch time, or on the subway. On average, most novels contain about a dozen chapters. How to use our book page count calculator select your word print size select the book genre enter your books word count press calculate number of pages just 4 easy steps and youre done.
I use the target average of 1,500 words per chapter. You can find the volumes online, but many are out of print. As with everything else when it comes to writing a book, these are only guidelinesnot rules. For a printed book, 37,000 words is definitely on the short side less than 150 pages so publishers may not be interested as pricing will be low and volumes needing to be correspondingly high. If you want to assign chapters ahead, decide what will happen in each chapter before you number them, so each chapter will be an average length.
Some will tell you 2,500 words is the average, while others will say that 3,000 to 5,000 word chapters are more likely to be the norm. Lets assume that the total number of pages in the book is x pages. If they want a 6 x 9 book, this is only about 66 pagesalmost not a book. Though the average word count of a chapter is around 2,000 5,000 words, it all depends on your story. A hard and fast rule is that most novels hover in word count between 60,000 words and 150,000 words, with 80,000 words being the average word count amount that pleases the most print publishers. However, many authors, frustrated with the low price of ebooks, have taken to writing ebooks that are between 40,000 and 50,000. Calculate book page count using word count for book design. In 2011, the lists average length peaked at 467 pages. Bible statistics, number of chapter, number of verses. The final page number effectively, the books grand total will appear in the bottom row, that for your index. A typical number is 12 to 18 but you might have 8 or even 25. When writing a book, is there a minimum amount of pages. Typically books of poems with 1 page per poem are around 2530 pages long, however i have seen books that are longer than 50 poems.
Instead of counting pages per chapter, you can simply divide the total number of pages in the book by its number of chapters. But for suspense novels youll be going up into 50s and even to 90 chapters with only 3. There is no set limit for words in a chapter, high or low. Hence, the total number of pages in 14 chapters are 784. New writers tend to assume that a chapter must be a certain set length in order to maintain the average novel length of around 80,000 95,000 words, but in truth, chapters can be as long or as short as you need them to be. When writing a book, is there a minimum amount of pages that it should have. Clicking on a chapter will show you the text of that chapter of numbers in the bible king james version. Now that you know the average number of words per page in your book, you can calculate the page count with a little arithmetic. You shouldnt set manuscript guidelines for yourself on chapter length. How to create chapters in your novel ny book editors.
Numbers bible book with full chapters king james version. Numbers these are all of the chapters of the book of numbers. Nonfiction requires more thinking time from your reader, so you need to consider the role of your book. It is usually the number of words or pages that is most relevant to readers. So that usually includes everything from chapter books, to middle grade, to young adult novels. To do so, get the number of sections by dividing the grand total of pages by 16, then round up to a whole number of sections, multiplying these by 16. But then, there are some that contain as many as 3050 chapters. But for suspense novels youll be going up into 50s and even to 90 chapters with only 34 pages a chapter.
Regardless of genre, there is no hard and fast rule about how many pages or words each chapter should contain or how many chapters should be in a book. Mind you that great classic, the little prince, was such a work. It really depends on the topics of your chapters and how much your text is broken up. If youve ever read a novel by james patterson, you know that he typically writes short chapters sometimes less than two pages long with one or two punchy scenes in each.
Of course, a printed book probably needs to be at least 100125 pages in length. However, there are some general guidelines in this article that may help you determine the page count and chapter length needed for your book. Again, you are at liberty to introduce 10 or even 200 chapters in your book if you so wish. Most books ive read, a chapter is about 27 pages long. Analyzing chapter lengths in fantasy fiction creativity. Simply divide the total word count from your word document by the number of words per page.
To find the mean average we divide the total x by 11 because there are 11 chapters in the book, which would equal to 36. As a rule, there are approximately 250 words to a page, so its easy enough to convert. Frequently asked questions getting published meg cabot. New writers tend to assume that a chapter must be a certain set length in order to maintain the average novel length of around 80,000 95,000 words, but in. The length can vary greatly between genres, though. Amazon ebook page length by genre kindle page length. Professionals in the publishing business use word count for the size of stories, because rega. Calculate the final extent and number of blank pages at the end of the book. Just how many chapters should you include in your novel. Some publishers have series of books with a maximum of pages. This book in multiple volumes is 3,277,227 words and is 7,312 pages, according to mental floss. When the same bookedition has a different number of pages in the hardcover, paperback, trade and scholastic printings, i dont know why you wouldnt expect the ebook to have a different page count, as well. The longest average chapter lengths were lord of the rings 7,500, prince of nothing 8,700, and the beefiest chapters were found. As previously discussed, there are different requirements for both fiction and nonfiction genres.
There is usually around 1015 pages in a chapter, although chapter sizes range from 3 pages to about 2530 pages. But ive also had authors send me 8 pages with just 2400 words, without realizing that, at this rate, their 7 chapters will amount to less than 20,000 words. The graph shows the average length of the top 100 bestsellers in each of the 30 main amazon kindle categories, measured in terms of the number of pages. Less than 100 pages and it becomes difficult for a printer to print the title of the book on the spine. Typical novels are about 260 pages, 65,000 words, and 18 chapters, about 14 pages a chapter. Today, however, while the physical size of a book may still matter in a bookstore, ebooks have no dimensions. Somewhere around the 20page mark is about the average. No strict rules are guiding the breaking down of novels into chapters. Just an alternate way not necessarily a better way of accomplishing the same thing.
How many words in a novel vary depending on genre, audience, and the story itself but in general, the average words in a novel is between 60,000 and 90,000 words for most genres. Should each 1500 word scene get its own chapter number. The typical range is 3565 pages for a chapter book, 4590 for a lowmiddlegrade, 90120 for a middlegrade, 150200 for a young, young adult, but these are just averages. Now that weve covered how many words are in a novel, its 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 depending on the writing genre, word count in book chapters can vary considerably. Why chapter length matters more than you think medium. That means your manuscript must be at least 3540,000 words long. Does this mean that every chapter must end up somewhere in this range. Calculate the number of pages using your current word count and the appropriate formula below, calculate the number of pages you can expect in your finished book. Some authors divide their story into parts part one, part two, and so on alongside the chapters. We want to give authors an easy way to show how long their book or novel is. So the length of these affects the pacing of your story, and the way. If you self pub, places such as amazon will print a book as low as 24 pages, so if your poetry is an epic poem it can be almost 1.
Im wondering, how much space there should be between the end of the word and the edge of the page on the first page and the edge of the page and the beginning of the word on the next page for a title that is centered across 2 pages. Books with much shorter sections become bestsellers all the time. I dont think that the number of chapters would be important. There are no rules at all stipulating the rudimentary patterns of splitting a book into chapters. Well, youll put the book down when you get to the end of this chapter, you reason. A novel has a number of major and minor dramatic pivots that ideally occur at points measured by word count. Word counts for childrens books i received a request awhile ago to do a post on word counts for different age categories in childrens lit. There is no set limit for pages in a chapter, high or low. According to amazons great text stats feature, the median length for all books is about 64,000 words. From these numbers, we can establish some guidelines.
601 495 1354 1578 1221 1510 325 128 871 899 11 1562 89 1635 147 1474 915 659 1465 1046 487 696 1460 648 50 200 1597 1160 1218 176 943 1572 674 517 514 881 697 583 395 349 800 993 1460 555 1096 580