How many words are in a novel?

The short answer

For a debut

80,000 to 100,000 words for most adult novels. Fantasy and science fiction run 90,000 to 120,000, young adult 60,000 to 80,000, middle grade 40,000 to 60,000.

The minimum

40,000 words. Below that, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) calls it a novella.

The classics

The 43 public domain novels we counted run from 25,642 words (Jekyll and Hyde) to 356,117 (David Copperfield). Half are shorter than 80,938.

Novel, novella or short story?

There is no law, but the bands most people cite are the ones SFWA uses for the Nebula Awards:

Short story

Under 7,500 words

Novelette

7,500 to 17,499 words

Novella

17,500 to 39,999 words

Novel

40,000 words or more

Word count by genre, for a debut

Agents and editors publish ranges, not rules, and the two most cited sources differ a little. Where they overlap is the safe zone. A finished book from an established author can run longer.

Writer's Digest calls 71,000 to 109,000 the workable range for adult fiction, and 90,000 to 124,000 probably fine for fantasy and science fiction. Harlequin's series romance lines run 50,000 to 75,000 words, each line with its own length.

43 classic novels, counted

Lists of famous word counts are copied from site to site, rarely with a method. So we downloaded 43 public domain novels from Project Gutenberg and counted the story itself, with the same rules as our word counter. The shaded band is what agents ask of a debut today.

The full data

Years are first publication in book form, or the year the serial finished. Genres are the shelf a bookshop would put them on today.

Download the counts with links to each Gutenberg edition as a CSV file, and check any of them yourself in the word counter.

What the classics show

• Only two of the 43, The Secret Garden (80,938) and Persuasion (83,345), land inside today's 80,000 to 100,000 debut window.
• Seven are under 40,000 words, so by SFWA's bands they are novellas: Jekyll and Hyde, Alice, A Christmas Carol, The Call of the Wild, The Time Machine, Heart of Darkness and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
• Twelve are over 150,000. Most of the longest first came out in parts: in magazines, in monthly numbers, or in three volumes.
• Old genre books ran short. Wells's science fiction is 32,535 to 60,123 words, and the two Sherlock Holmes novels 43,406 and 59,249, against 80,000 to 110,000 asked for today.
• The Great Gatsby is 48,407 words. A great novel can be short; a debut that short would be a harder sell now.

The lesson isn't to write like 1850 or to hit a number exactly. It is that length follows the story and the market of its day. Today's market sets the range; the story decides where in it you land.

How we counted

1. We downloaded the plain text of each book from Project Gutenberg on November 6, 2026.
2. We kept only the text between Gutenberg's start and end lines, so the licence and catalogue notes are gone.
3. We counted from the first line of the story to its last. Title pages, contents, dedications and prefaces are out, including the author's own. An opening letter, prologue or prelude that is part of the story stays in, as do epilogues.
4. We removed illustration captions, transcriber's notes, and anything after a closing "THE END", such as publishers' notes.
5. We counted words with our word counter's rules: a word is a run of letters or digits; don't, mother-in-law and 1,000 count once; dashes and slashes separate words.

Some editions differ. Gutenberg's Frankenstein is the revised 1831 text, Little Women includes both parts, The Scarlet Letter starts at chapter I without the introductory sketch "The Custom-House", and Moby-Dick starts at chapter 1 without the Etymology and Extracts. Another counter or edition may differ from ours by a fraction of a percent.

How long is my book? A reference card

The story categories, the genre ranges and the sums for pages, reading time and audiobook length on one card, with space for your own numbers. Copy it, or download it as a Markdown file.

Planning a book to a length

A target is easier to hit in pieces. Divide it by the chapters you expect, then by the scenes in a chapter. An 85,000 word novel in 28 chapters is about 3,000 words a chapter; at three scenes a chapter, about 1,000 words a scene.

Paste a draft into our word counter to see where it stands against your genre, and use the character counter when a query form, pitch or synopsis box has a character limit. In Feldar, you plan each chapter as an Outline of scenes and set Target words in the Generation settings. For the whole path from idea to draft, read how to write a book.

Sources

All checked November 6, 2026.

Categories

SFWA Nebula Awards rules, effective for the 2026 award year

By genre

The Manuscript Academy, with literary agent Noelle Falcis Math; Writer's Digest, Chuck Sambuchino

Series romance

Write for Harlequin

Texts

Project Gutenberg plain text editions; eBook numbers are in our CSV

Pages and time

Our assumptions: 250 words a manuscript page, 250 to 350 a paperback page, reading at 260 words a minute, narration at 155

Questions