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Word Count Freedom

J.F. Lawrence

Many indie-publishing authors want to know how long their books "should be." The long and short of it: book lengths don't matter. Stories matter.

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Many indie/self-publishing authors want to know how long their books "should be." Here are my thoughts on the subject. The long and short of it is that book lengths don't matter. Stories matter. The good news is that indie authors have more freedom to write the story they want.

One of the beauties of self-publishing is that we have more leeway to tell the story we want/need to tell. Traditional agents, editors, and publishers push books into a "standard" range of book lengths and force new authors toward the lower end because they cost more to publish.

NOTE: Publishers know the industry, so they might be right.

YOUR STORY

The most important thing you need to keep in mind is that it is your book and your story, so make the story as long or short as it needs to be. While articles and blog posts may need to focus on brevity, books are, by definition, long-format. That gives you the freedom to choose whether to write a tome or a quick read.

If you drone on to pad your book, you won't be true to yourself and your readers will notice. Because you write for yourself and toil endlessly to share your hard work with the world, it would be a shame to ruin it.

If you cut the book by skimping on the setting, mood, character arc, or plot, you will lose your interest in the work and leave readers wanting. Let your pages shine.

Consideration: Longer books cost more to print, meaning higher print costs.

GET FEEDBACK

Once you've written the story you want, put your words in front of trusted beta readers to get their impression. Are you boring them with long exposition? Are you losing them in the details? Does your main character have enough emphasis on the page? It is easy to be too close to our writing to see it from an objective viewpoint. Your readers have fresh eyes, so they can ground your work in a way that will resonate with other readers.

Resources: This post may help you get your head around feedback.

Here are a few important things to remember about getting feedback.

  1. Always be gracious.

  2. They're trying to help, not hurt.

  3. They aren't always right.

  4. They raise issues, not fixes.

  5. They must enjoy/read your genre.

  6. Always be gracious (Intentionally repeated).

THE LANDSCAPE

If you aren't the type to jump into data, that's okay. The gist of what will follow is that your books can have wildly different lengths than "industry standards." Average book lengths vary by genre, but individual books can be half or double the standard within that genre and still be phenomenal.

Note: Readers almost never look at book length before buying/reading.

Book lengths may range drastically within a single series. The longest or shortest may be at the beginning, end, or somewhere in the middle. The authors wrote the stories as they needed to be told.

THE DATA

GENRE RANGES

Different genres have different average lengths and ranges for the "standard books." While readers almost never look at a book-length online, some pay more attention when browsing in brick-and-mortar stores. Many successful books break these industry standards.

  • Fantasy & Sci-Fi: 90-130k

  • Mystery & Thriller: 70-100k

  • Literary Fiction: 70-100k

  • Romance: 70-100k

  • Historical Fiction: 80-120k

  • Young Adult: 50-80k

  • Middle Grade: 20-55k

  • Memoir: 50-90k

  • Nonfiction: 50-80k

ONE GENRE

Within a genre, the lengths vary more than most people would have you believe. Because I know Sci-Fi the best, here are some great Sci-Fi novels from very successful indie-published books and their word counts.

  • The Space Legacy Series (Self-Pub): 90-115k

  • Expeditionary Force Series (Self-Pub): 130-215k

  • Wool Omnibus: 180k

  • Undying Mercenaries: 120-180k

Note: Longer audiobooks are more expensive to hire narrators.

VARIATION IN SERIES

Books within a series can have wildly different lengths. Usually, the first book is the shortest, and later books are longer. To give you a sense of some of the variation in novel length within a single series, here are some of my favorite traditionally published Sci-Fi novels.

  • Bobiverse Series: 96-204k

  • Undying Mercenaries Series: 130-190k

  • Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars: 290-385k

  • Lost Fleet Series: 115-135k

  • Mountain Man Omnibus (Apocalyptic): 335k

  • Arison Series (Apocalyptic): 60-220k

  • Rebel Fleet Series: 125-145k

Note: These are highly successful books by established authors, so the results may be skewed.

SINGLE-AUTHOR VARIATION

To put my words where my mouth is, here is where my books stand. As you can see, they are all over the place. Sci-Fi tends to run longer than other genres, so this biases my expectations of what a novel should be. I'm not saying my books are selling like hotcakes, but this gives you a sense of where I stand.

  • Day After Infinity (Hard Sci-Fi): 104k

  • Metal (Apocalyptic): 124k

  • Nanoverse Series (YA - Superhero): 93-113k

  • ENDED Series (Hard Sci-Fi - In progress): 140-165k

TRADITIONALLY PUB'ED BOOKS

Sticking to the Sci-Fi theme to compare cybatronic apples with cybatronic apples, here is the variation in length within the genre. With books from 61k to 181k words, you can see there is no standard.

  • Red Rising - 124k

  • Old Man's War - 90k

  • Dune - 185k

  • Forever Peace - 104k

  • The Ghost Brigades - 103k

  • Hammerfall - 157k

  • Mars - 175k

  • Ender's Shadow - 140k

  • Hidden Empire - 171k

  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - 61k

  • The Parable of the Sower - 178k

  • The Mote in God's Eye - 178k

  • The Musashi Flex - 91k

  • Steampunk Trilogy - 88k (average)

  • City of Bones - 130k

  • Hellbent - 66k

  • Wicked Lovely - 73k

  • The Lost Art - 115k

  • The Knife of Never Letting Go - 112k

  • The Inferior - 99k

  • The Windup Girl - 145k

  • The City & The City - 108k

  • Boneshaker - 145k

  • Palimpsest - 104k

  • Julian Comstock - 181k

INDIE AUTHOR WCS

Here are some word counts from authors who responded to my request for word counts to see the variety in lengths of indie books. If you want to add to this list, please follow this link to the request thread on X.

Note: I used the data provided by the authors, so some of this data may be incomplete or incorrect.

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