I recently spoke to an entrepreneur interested in working with me to help her complete a manuscript she'd been trying to finish for several months. She had some concern about the length, as all new writers do, and she told me it was about 120 pages. I thought that didn't sound like a lot - but page count can be deceptive since it depends on the fonts and line spacing the person used on the file - and I told her as much. When she sent me the file I checked the word count. It came in at just over 60,000 words. In the publishing process, depending on the page size of her book and its layout, this book could become 200-250 pages. That's your average-size book - maybe even on the big side. And she had no idea she had written so much!

What's Important

When you think about book length, always think in word count. Consider it the language of the publishing business. This is easy to figure out because most word processing programs will automatically count the text for you. In Microsoft Word you can have a running count at the bottom of your document's window.

Now, how long should your book be? The concerns are different for fiction and non-fiction. With fiction, there are some general numbers editors look for:

• Novel: 75,000-120,000 words

• Novella (and this includes many mystery books): up to 60,000 words

• Short Story: up to 10,000 words

For non-fiction you have a couple of things to consider:

Target Audience

You have to think about who you are writing your non-fiction book for, what that audience expects and how they will use the book. One of my clients has a target audience of hospital doctors. After interviewing many doctors to find out what they wanted in the type of book she might write from them and they said the book had to be thin, so they could roll it up and put it in their back pockets to read when they had a moment to spare. So, as you can imagine, her book is not going to be the size of War and Peace.

On the other hand, you might have an audience that wouldn't take a book seriously if it wasn't a certain length. "It's not a real book" they might say. It's up to you to figure out if you have this kind of audience and whether you have enough material to satisfy them.

Getting Your Point Across

The length of your book will also depend on how long it takes you to say what you have to say. Ideally your book is planned to do certain things - perhaps teach a technique or inspire by telling stories. You could say the book has a mission. At the beginning you tell the reader exactly how the book works and what they will be getting out of it. Then you write the book until it delivers on that promise. It could take you 35,000 words to do that. It could take 60,000. The point is that if you're trying to pad out the book so it's a certain length, the reader will be able to tell. They'll also be able to tell if you're shoving a lot of stuff into a small number of pages and leaving out key points. Either way, the book won't succeed.

So, how long should your book be? Unless you're working with an editor who is asking you for a specific word count, I'd say "as long as the book needs to be". Write the right book. Write your best book. Let the folks who have to produce/print your book figure out the rest.

© 2008 Sophfronia Scott