What is the Ideal Novel Length?

If you search the internet for novel length, you will mostly receive the standard advice that a novel should fall somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 words.

That is absolutely true. But what you won't find is more general advice on the factors which determine how long a novel will be - and I'll tell you now, the final word count of your novel has little to do with the complexity (or otherwise) of the plot.

This article, then, is split into two parts:

First, all the facts and figures of how long a novel should be.
Then more general advice on how, precisely, you can write a piece of fiction to a pre-determined length.

The Facts & Figures of Novel Length

Okay, here goes...

A novel is anything over 50,000 words
A novella is between 20,000 and 50,000 words
A short story has a word count of under 20,000 words

Short stories, incidentally, are more generally considered to range between 1,000 and 7,500 words...

Anything under this is known as a short-short, or as flash fiction.
Anything longer is sometimes called a novelette, though because this is a derogatory term (meaning fiction which is light on substance rather than length), a long story is a better term.

However you describe short stories, they are published both individually in magazines and collectively in book form. Novellas might be published individually as a thin book, or they might form part of a story collection.

But let's return to the matter in hand: the length of novels...

I said at the top that the ideal length for a novel is 80-100,000 words. Anything less than 70,000 or over 110,000 might make publishers think twice before accepting it.

Why? Because publishing is a business:

Thin novels might be cheaper to produce, but book buyers won't feel that they are receiving their money's worth - a 150-page book does not sell for half the price of a 300-page book.
Thick novels will be more expensive to print, meaning more units will have to be sold to reach the same amount of profit - 600-page novels are not twice the price of those of 300 pages.

In short, 80 to 100,000 words seems to be the "sweet spot" of novel length, particularly for a first-time novelist (who always represents more of a gamble for publishers).

If you do stray outside these limits, it is much better to write a long novel than a short one. Short novels are difficult to expand without a complete rewrite, but long ones can be pruned by a good editor or perhaps even released as two books.

If you absolutely insist on producing the next Animal Farm (30,000 words) or War and Peace (500,000 words), wait until later in your career when your name carries more commercial clout.

Oh, one last thing. Although novel length is genre-dependent to an extent (fantasy novels, for example, tend to be on the thicker side), sticking to the sweet spot, at least for your first novel, is still the best advice.

How to Write a Novel to a Pre-Determined Length

This is where things start to get interesting.

Let's say you have already planned your novel and are ready to start writing it. You are going to aim for 80,000 words (which is about 350 manuscript pages or 250 book pages). So you start writing...