The development stage of writing a book can be daunting. You have all these ideas, many of them still murky and inchoate, and you’re working towards giving them shape. There are so many unknowns, so it’s hard to know what you can count on in making your plan. It’s both an exciting and terrifying place to be. Sometimes, even the most basic starting point questions are hard to answer, because they’re so much range and possibility. Having a clear word count goal in mind, however, can be one way to make starting out feel a little less daunting and more concrete. Maintaining your momentum through the writing process requires goals you can quantify and celebrate. In today’s video and the blog below, we review how to decide a (ballpark) word count and length for your book.
Once you have established your word count goal, we have a free tool to help you figure out your figure out how long your drafting stage should take, start to finish! Click here to access our writing plan calculator! We also have our full process checklist that can show you the steps you can take to take your project from idea to published book.
Of course, word counts of published books vary, and there is no exact science to knowing the perfect number of words needed to get your points across. So why have a goal set when you start out at all?
First, to get the book finished, you need to determine a realistic and accomplishable scope for your story or for the ideas you want to explore. If you try to start with the notion that you’ll write a thousand words a day, or something similar, it’s more likely that your book will meander, that your focus and high-level message won’t be clear or consistent, and potentially, you’ll never be really sure when you’ve gotten to “the end.” As we’ve said many times before, the key to the development stage of your project is making an outline. The outline not only gives you a roadmap for your book, but it also gives you an idea of how much space each point or scene can take up.
Your outline can help ensure your main points receive sufficient weight or that your narrative moves forward in a clear arc and direction. When you have that overarching plan and start your drafting stage, it makes sense to have a word goal (or a word limit) for each section to keep you on track and relatively faithful to your outline.
Normative Book Lengths
To set the word count goal for your overall book, it helps to know what standards are expected by readers and the publishing industry, especially if you plan to publish traditionally. This is because while readers do have some preferences for lengths of book, they are far less picky than publishers. For a traditional publisher, a book that falls outside its expected word count range, that may be reason enough to pass if over for another project. Your average reader, however, is only likely to notice if the book is extremely short (and priced the same as longer titled) or extremely long (and intimidating looking). So, as you consider these ranges, keep in mind that you should follow them more strictly if you are planning a traditional publishing path. You have a little more leeway if you’re planning to self or hybrid publish.
Topical Non-fiction
Business-centered books tend to run towards the most concise of the non-fiction subgenres. We recommend shooting for 45,000 words, though as short as 30,000 or as long as 50,000 words would still be within range. Business readers tend to be looking for the most concrete, actionable advice with the minimum time investment, so keeping it tight and digestible is an important consideration.
Self-help and personal development books can range widely based both on the complexity of the topic and the target audience. Generally, books aimed for a general audience should be on the shorter side of the range, while insider books aimed at fellows in a particular field can be a bit more developed and longer. For a general audience, aim for 55,000-65,000 words. For a technical audience, you can go upwards of 80,000-100,000 words. It’s worth noting that for longer, technical books, the publishers’ expectations for your platform and experience are higher.
Memoir
Memoir has a special place in the market in that it is nonfiction, but as a narrative form can attract readers of fiction. We find that a sweet spot for memoir, especially for first time authors, is 60,000 words. One plus is that 60,000 words divides very neatly into 20 chapters of 3,000 words each. At a chapter a week, this puts your drafting stage at a very doable 20 weeks. Memoirs can run longer, however, and can often approach novel-length at closer to 80,000 words. If, in your drafting stage, you find that your chapters are coming out at about 4000 words instead of 3000 words, then you can rest easy that you are still within range of expectations for traditional publishers.
Novels
At Page and Podium we do not specialize in fiction, but generally speaking fiction runs longer than trade nonfiction, usually starting around 70,000 words. It varies widely by subgenre with the heavy world-building genres of fantasy and science fiction stretching out to be 100,000 words. If you’re writing a memoir or a trade non-fiction, it can be tempting to compare your book to the novels on your shelf in length, but keep in mind that the market expectations are very different between nonfiction and novels.
Tailoring your word count to your project
While you do want to keep the expected ranges in mind (especially if you’re traditionally publishing), you also want to consider the specifics of your project when determining your word count goal.
Do you need a goal or a limit?
This is a question to ask yourself about your writing habits. Do you tend towards the long winded or do you tend towards fewer details? Depending on your style and habits, you may think about your word count goal or a goal to make your point within a contained number of words. Depending on your style, give yourself some leeway towards your natural habits, but be wary of making too much of an exception.
How much depth does your topic demand?
Now, this may sound like a question that depends on your ideas and how complicated they are. However, that is not what you need to consider, but rather what depth your audience needs from your topic. For business books, for example, if your audience is first-time entrepreneurs or young people entering a certain professional field, your audience needs the depth to be a little shallower so they can absorb the basic ideas in full. That doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t have more to say, even a lot more to say, but that saying more would diminish the effectiveness of your points to your audience. On the other hand, readers of memoirs want visceral details. They want an emotional connection to your experiences, and this takes a bit more time (and words) to develop.
Word count goals are guidelines, not targets
As you write, you want to keep in mind that word count goals are guidelines to keep you on track. There is no special prize for those who have chapters that are all exactly the same length or you manage to round to the nearest ten-thousand exactly on the dot. If you are writing a memoir with our recommended starting point of twenty, 3000 word chapters (for a total of 60,000 words), you might find that a chapter comes to a natural end closer to 2157. Or perhaps 3479. Over the course of a book, this may naturally even out and all come out in the wash. You may find that you need to trim some and fill out others in revision but be sure to give yourself plenty of flexibility.
Your first draft may or may not hit within your target word count range. Personally, I’m an over-writer by nature, so I plan to have a pass at my draft that I call the “decimation edit” where I delete at least one word for every ten. If you tend to the concise, you might find that you want to give your first, on-the-shorter-side draft to a trusted friend to see what questions they have as they read. If you address those questions in revision, you’ll probably find yourself falling closer to the expectation.
Word count doesn’t say anything about you
Some authors want longer, heftier books not because the topic demands that level of depth, but because they want that feeling of weight and importance. I’ll admit, there’s something about imagining your ideas bound together in a tome that is enticing. But we have all read books that were really long and we wondered why they were so long, and we have all read short books that packed a punch in only a hundred or so pages. We want to remind all writers, especially those working on their first book, that whether your word count is on the lower or higher side doesn’t mean anything about you as a person, as a writer, or about the quality of your ideas.
Happy writing!
