In itself, no measure is perfect but personally i find word count the most useful. The first book in each series below was the authors first. Download how to write a chapter book as pdf this entry is part of the series format essentials be sure to check out the other posts. Reading length is a participant in the amazon services llc associates program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to and affiliated sites. Obviously, the examples under each category are above and below what is generally accepted. In contrast, word count is finite and usually i can calculate book length with about 99% accuracy in part because also included in any calculation is a count of figures, tables, etc. Chapters need to be relatively equal in length for the structure of the book to make sense. Your target audience for these is kids ages 4 to 8. It is feasible to count the number of words in a published chapter. But chapter word count is something that you want to keep in. The actual word count for harry potter and the sorcerers stone is 78,792 and my utility calculates 77,876. I just popped into my office and pulled a few books off the shelf. I built one logos word list like this for every single book of the bible. Your guide to book word counts fiction and nonfiction.
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. You wont get exact, but youre wondering whether 35k is reasonable, so you dont need exact. If you are an author of a book or know of a books accurate wordcount, contact me. We are also going to look at how harry potter is comparable to other young adult novels in regards to word count. For this reason, there really is no average word count within the range. But the word count of a chapter matters if you want your story to flow right. We will only consider sf, fantasy, horror or ya crossover novels. For average word counts based on genre, see this handy reference.
The 57 year old reading range straddles a few different categories of books. Therefore, the word count of a novel is crucial if you want your book to be fit for publication. I am writing the last chapter of my childrens chapter book manuscript and am currently just shy of 23k. The word count 788,280 is based on the kjv and seems to be almost exactly as wed expect see our page on how many words in the bible for more information on this. Agent jennifer laughran gives the word count for books for beginning readers as 100 and 2,000 words, depending on reading level.
Wordcounter will help to make sure its word count reaches a specific requirement or stays within a certain limit. When i started writing three years ago, the mg word count i kept hearing was no more than 30,000 words. Childrens chapter books word count age 69 word count. So many people today rely on the word count given by their software program, but when you go to print a physical book, the pages matter. Each chapter is a mini story in its own right, so to work properly, just like any story, each chapter must have, as a bare minimum, a beginning, a middle, and an end. For most publishers, a book is novellength when its between 50,000 and 110,000 words.
Once you know your word count, follow one of our two methods below to estimate your page count. When writing for the younger ages especially, every word must count. If yours is too short, restructure it and add more tightly written stuff. Well, youll put the book down when you get to the end of this chapter, you. Search for word count totals in books word counters. Word count varied from 5,000 words to 40,000 words, with an average mean of 17,200 and a median word count of 8,500. Can be publisher specific, ranging from 3,000 to absolute max 5,000. Book title chapter count verse count word count 1 genesis 50 1,533 38,262 2 exodus 40 1,2 32,685. Chapter count verse count word count 40 matthew 28 1,071 23,343 41. The eight harry potter books have an impressive combined word count of over 1 million words. The hunger games has a word count of 99,750 and my utility calculates it at 98,916. Word count estimates are not guaranteed to be accurate. It should be enough to communicate your message effectively.
On a scale of one bad to ten excellent, chapter books rate their agents overall as an 8. Hi, im a little confused about the word count for chapter books. If i tell you that my book is 70,000 words, and send you an 800 page correctly formated ms the 1. Word count for famous novels organized commonplace book. That left me with 66 logos word lists, each giving me every originallanguage word in a given book of the bible. King james version bible breakdown books, chapters. From a conference, paula sadler had given out a handout that said the word.
Compressing a very exciting scene so you can meet your chapter word count target is also not going to do you any favors. That said, this figure differs from book to book and organization to. Coyne uses the nanowrimo word count length of 50,000 words for his examples, calling 50,000 words a good foundation to build upon. Harry potter and the sorcerers stone has 17 chapters with titles, and about 4560 words per chapter. If youd like some guidelines, you can assume that the average nonfiction book is 50k words, and that they have 12 chapters, so around 4k words would be an average chapter length.
At a writers conference i recently attended, publishing veteran jane friedman said 80,000 words is good for most fiction, below 60,000 isnt novel length territory, and above 120,000 is likely too much. Chapter books span a wide audience and reading levels vary. A statistical analysis of robert jordans the wheel of time. On average, how long is a childrens book for children. Perkins agency in new york says its much easier to market a firsttime novelists book if the word count falls between 80,000 and 100,000 words, or roughly 300 doublespaced, typed pagesthe average novel length.
For direct submissions we only consider complete and unpublished science fiction, fantasy and horror novels, written in english of between 95,000 150,000 words. How many words in each book of the bible the holy word. How to write early readers, easy chapter books, and chapter. Neither too long nor too short, this book length signals a novelists competency and knowledge of the publishing market to prospective agents and editors. Sharp objects has a word count of 80,565 and my utility calculates it at 80,7. Early readers are the earliest chapter stories that a kid can get. Childrens book writers must adhere to strict industry standards for word counts.
Writing chapter books a look at the numbers hannah holt. Board books are those tough little things you give to the smallest of readers. Or to put it another way every chapter needs a three line plot. The average nonfiction book is about 50,000 to 75,000 words, which is about 153 to 230 ebook pages. Put simply, the sweet spot for a novels word count is generally said to be around 8090k. Shorter novels such as fahrenheit 451, the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, the great gatsby, and slaughterhousefive are between 4050,000 words. If the word count of twilight is disregarded, the average becomes around 88,625. Calculate book page count using word count for book design. Better to have solid, clear information than rambling to make a page count. The authors had sold between 10 copies and 2 million copies of their chapter books. Many, yes, but there are exceptions due to the layout and font size of a particular book. The use of words is very simple, there are illustrations on every page and the print is very large. Onethird of the novels that come into the agency are rejected because theyre too long or short, perkins says.
Your chapter length has to work well with the overall word count of the book short chapters create an even distribution of both content and action. Discover the sweet spot for your chapters word count in this post. Armed with these word counts, i now have a range of lengths that have been proven popular. Theyre very short in terms of manuscript length 1,500 words max but are broken up into either chapters or vignettes that will give the reader the feeling of reading a book with real chapters in it. Ali, 9000 words is on the upper end of the chapter book spectrum. For example, atonement has a word count of 123,378 and my utility comes up with 110,765 words.
Thats why the traditional submission formats exist. This averages to about 22 to 23 chapters per novel, with the average chapter length around 4,280 words. Since just comparing the number of unique words in a book does not take its length into account i decided to calculate the percentage of unique words of the whole text. Twilight has 24 titled chapters, or 26 if you count the preface and epilogue, and about 4580 words per chapter. Harry potter and the sorcerers stone has an average of 4,560 words per chapter. Your article was a welcome relief to me since i cannot justify writing for the sake of adding to my word count if the story is already complete. Even if you think you have a great early reader idea, it has to be a very precise fit for a publishers established vocabsentenceword count. Stephen king word count 112263 274,672 bag of bones 203,3 black house 252,270 blockade billy 15,917 carrie 60,718 cell 121,931 christine 193,602 cujo 121,150 cycle of the werewolf 15,955 desperation.
As you can see, established authors get much more flexibility when it comes to the length of their book. But more than word count, its content and reading difficulty that will better define what you have. The word count range for each age level is only a guideline. Though the average word count of a chapter is around 2,000 5,000 words, it all depends on your story. There are plenty of books that purposefully play with the word counts of their chapters. If youre working on a novellength book, aim for 50,000 words at the very least but its better to aim for 90,000. I have found the website dogobooks to be the most useful place to check the word count of popular books for kids. In this article, were going to look at how many words are in the harry potter series. Based on this list compiled by nicole humphrey cook. The hobbit has more unique words and a higher unique word density than both the silmarillion and each volume in the lord of the rings.
The page count is 32 or 40 pages with a word count of under 1,500. Eye of the world was one of the more normally distributed book in terms of chapter wordcount, which essentially means it had a mostcommon chapter length and a comparable number of chapters that were longer or shorter the dragon reborn was rightskewed, which means there was a heavy distribution of. For example, if an author has to write a minimum or maximum amount of words for an article, essay, report, story, book, paper, you name it. The hunger games has 27 untitled chapters, and about 3700 words per chapter. Writing towards a word count might not work for everybody, but having a rough goal in mind certainly helps me when im sketching out chapters and undertaking my first draft. That number actually lines up pretty well with the data we have on this, but again, that number should neither be. Word count for famous novels, in ascending order by number of words. Otherwise, the inconsistency could drive the reader away from the book altogether.
For the book hatchet, the actual word count is 41,672 and i give you. A reasonable word count for a nonfiction book would be between 30,000 to 50,000 words. However, there is a wide range of acceptable word counts for nonfiction books. A minimum count for a nonfiction ebook is about 10,000 words, as long as the content is solid. Line count varies depending on page size, font size, etc. As with everything else when it comes to writing a book, these are only guidelinesnot rules. Pencilthin books on narrow topics that are under 50,000 words are quite common. Word count for famous novels organized by hawthorn mineart, under books, writing. While the idea of chapters in the 3,000 to 5,000word range is a good guideline when roughing out your books structure, it isnt a rule, and the story itself should be the primary deciding factor. Never pad your manuscript just to meet a wordcount guideline.
There are some variations between versions with includedexcluded text and verses, however, for the purpose of establishing the relative lengths of each book, these counts are. Word counts of popular ya books as i started drafting my new wip a ya scifi thriller i began wondering what word count i should aim for. This is a lot of information at a glance, so ill distill a few salient observations. Count up the total number of words on 10 random full lines from different places and divide by 10 to get the average wordsperline count the number of lines on each page to get the linesperpage check that the book actually starts on page 1 sometimes the stuff before it starts is counted then. How many words are in an average chapter in a novel. T he indie author chris fox coined the term potato chip chapters for easilydigestible book chapters of a certain size. Youll use the word count in your word document to calculate book page count.