Word limits change depending on genre and intended audience. As a rule of thumb, for most novels, the area you're looking for is about 80,000 to 120,000.
Young adult novels and other books are sometimes shorter than 80,000 words. Technically speaking, a novel is anything over 50,000 words, but that would be very short. It really depends on what kind of book you want to write. Also I've read in several places that nobody wants to publish anything over 100,000 words, since the cost of printing it goes up exponentially after that point.
A short story is technically anything up to 30,000, and a novella is 30 to 50k.
the golden number for a beginning author is 90,000, I've heard. The other numbers are like the wider circles on a dart board; 90,000 is the bulls-eye. For specifics, here's a excerpt from this blog: http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/2 ... count.html Mystery: I think that for mysteries you often have the freedom of writing a book that’s a little shorter. In the case of mysteries 70,000 to 90,000 words will likely work for you.
Romance: 80,000 to 100,000, and no, I’m not counting category. If you’re writing category you’ll need to follow the very specific word count requirements of that line.
Fantasy or SF: Here you can go a little bit longer. Some publishers will accept books in the 80,000 to 125,000 range.
YA: 50,000 to 75,000, and yes, this is an area that can get really fudgy (I made that up), but again, in the 80,000 range is good. **I corrected these numbers after feedback from others (and comment from Kim) although I do think with YA these days you can still be safe in 80,000 words although maybe a tad high. Fantasy YA of course can be higher.
Women’s fiction, literary fiction or anything I failed to mention above: 80,000 to 100,000 (sometimes 125,000, especially in the case of literary fiction). And there you have it
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