And if I may say so myself, I'm doing pretty well, I have 75% of the first chapter done and I'm planning out the rest as we speak and then putting them in some sort of outline for when I actually sit down and write. I just wanted to ask, do you think 324 pages is a decent sized first-time novel? Because I plan on finishing this one sometime...not soon, but eventually.
I remember hearing something about the "reasonable" wordcount being 120,000 for a first-time novel. No idea how many pages that translates to, but that's thin enough to not cost a lot printing, which is an important consideration for publication. Printing cost can be astronomical, and that's where most of the cost of a book comes from.
But, really, it's up to an agent/publication house to determine what's "reasonable." When you get closer to finishing the story (page/word counts tend to run away with you as you write, either forward or backwards), start asking around as to what's considered a "good wordcount" for a first-time novel.
Also, don't consider a story "finished" until at least draft three. It takes that long to find errors in plot, character, ect. I'm on draft 11 on my novel (written over the past 5 years) and it's still not consistent, character-wise. So it can take a long time.
Hope this helps!
~Rosey
A writer is a world trapped in a person— Victor Hugo
Ink is blood. Paper is bandages. The wounded press books to their heart to know they're not alone.
120,000 words is a really big novel, somewhere on the lines of an epic fantasy. YA is usually 60-75,000, romance is around there, mystery is 70-90,00 and both fantasy and sci-fi tend to run longer, say 75-95,00 words. Most publishing houses don't like novels over 100,000 words from a first-time novelist.
[url]thelibrarygirl.blogspot.com[/url] Everything Weird Happens at the Library
For a debut novel, it should be 70000 words to about 110000 words. Over that it is generally considered an epic, and puplishers do not usually accept epics as a debut novel (because of the financial risks)
If the stories for NaNo are 50,000 words, translating into 175 pages (a novella), then I'd supposed that anything around the range of... like everyone else said, about 90-100,000 words, if you're keeping it around the 300 range.
