Length

[Aakaakaak]

This has been quite educational.

So
100k+ words = Novel
50k+ words = NaNo (Is NaNo basically a Novella? I'm new to that term.)

Did I miss one?

[Enjorous]

Vingette < 1000 words
Short Story 1,000-7,500 words
Novelette 7,500-20,000 words
Novella 20,000-50,000 words
Novel >50,000

That's how I've always heard it. But I wouldn't say any of those are quote typical unquote lengths.

NaNo is the abbreviation of National Novel Writing Month.

[trboturtle]

Stories will write themselves to some extent....

What I mean that some stories can't be filled out to a novel and others need to taken into a 100K word territory to be fully told. Good writers know when a story is told and when it needs to be fleshed out.

Short stories are generally strightforward plots, where everything in the story relates back to that idea. Novels allow for subplots, but even they are tied into to the main plot. Characters in short stories have to established quickly, while novels can take time to add layers to their characters.

Sometimes, it is hard to get a handle on a story -- short stories ideas cannot be streched into a Novels and Novel ideas can't be stuffed into s short story. Knowing what a story will fit is a matter of experence and feel....

Craig

[Starbeam]

Vingette < 1000 words
Short Story 1,000-7,500 words
Novelette 7,500-20,000 words
Novella 20,000-50,000 words
Novel >50,000

That's how I've always heard it. But I wouldn't say any of those are quote typical unquote lengths.

NaNo is the abbreviation of National Novel Writing Month.

I would say that a short story could be up to 10,000.  A lot of magazines will take short story submissions up to, but not over, that length.  Well, at least most of the magazines I've looked at, which were all speculative fiction.

[Enjorous]

See like I said those are what I've heard, but I've seen other variations like novels being over 60,000 instead of 50. I'm trying to remember where I found it so I can make sure I'm not misquoting that.

[Kali]

Chris Baty, the creator/founder of National Novel Writing Month, initially chose 50k words because that was the rough word count of a slim novel on his bookshelf (which one escapes me at the moment).  In years following, they've kept 50k because they found it both doable for people who had jobs and families and yet a challenge for most.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is around 50k. So are a lot of the slimmer novels by Anne McCaffrey like Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, and Dragondrums from the Harper Hall Trilogy.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I think the defining line for what counts as a novel where the Hugo Awards are concerned is 40,000 words, fwiw.

[meh]

I think the defining line for what counts as a novel where the Hugo Awards are concerned is 40,000 words, fwiw.

"Aim high.   You might hit something"


 

[Enjorous]

I think the defining line for what counts as a novel where the Hugo Awards are concerned is 40,000 words, fwiw.

Locus (a big sci-fi/fantasy magazine) also calls a novel anything above 40,000. And that's based on the standards set down by The World Science Fiction Convention.

[Aakaakaak]

So, to frame a possibly better question. How many words do you need for it to be considered marketable to publishers nowadays? Does 50k still fly?

[Kali]

From the rather extensive reading I've been doing (agent-shopping), no.  That depends strongly on the genre, though.

Most agents say editors (and therefore the agents themselves) are looking for urban fantasy novels in the 80-100k range for a first novel.  Once you've gotten the first couple under your belt, they're willing to let you go longer without giving you the hairy eyeball.

Young adult novels can be shorter.  Epic fantasy is expected to be longer.

That said, I bet Flowers for Algernon would still get the nod from most agents/editors if it were published today, and it's a short one at also around 50k.  Write great, and they won't care about the length.

That said, long or very short first novels are the exception. And, as the saying goes, plan on being the rule and not the exception.

[Enjorous]

That is an important distinction. What qualifies as a novel, and what qualifies as a publishable novel.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

Most agents say editors (and therefore the agents themselves) are looking for urban fantasy novels in the 80-100k range for a first novel.

Fair enough; I am not particularly focused on urban fantasy or well informed in that specific direction.

That said, I bet Flowers for Algernon would still get the nod from most agents/editors if it were published today, and it's a short one at also around 50k.  Write great, and they won't care about the length.

The novel version of Flowers for Algernon is an expansion from a rather successful shorter version, fwiw.

There's definitely been a trend since the 1950s and 60s to longer novels; on the other hand, there's also been a trend in the past decade or so, given the big-box bookstores' price-cap on hardback fiction, towards shorter novels than previous in the fantasy field.  I know Charlie Stross' The Family Trade, the first logical-volume/story-unit of the Merchant Princes books, was split into two physical volumes on these grounds, only a few years after some things intended as multivolume were being published in single volumes because of the accepted wisdom being fat fantasy novels outsell thin fantasy novels.

To summarise the summary of the summary; William Goldman was right. Nobody knows anything.

[Enjorous]

To summarise the summary of the summary; William Goldman was right. Nobody knows anything.

Ain't that the truth.

[Kali]

Which is why you do agent research, find out what agents want, and give them that.  Sure, you can sell a book that bucks the system, but that doesn't make it the SMART way to get a book published.  That's why I said plan on being the rule and not the exception. 

It's so unbelievably, ridiculously easy to get rejected.  Why on earth would you want to give an agent an instant reason to reject you?  Length will hit in the query letter.  They won't even GET to your amazing, singular, one-of-a-kind, once-in-a-lifetime manuscript.  They'll see, "This story is a completed alternate history novel of 210,000 words..." and hit the auto-reject button. 

Let's just take one agent (my first-choice agent), Jennifer Jackson.  She's Jim's agent, btw.  She keeps a blog and very kindly posts the stats on how many query letters she's read in a given week, how many requests-for-partials she's sent out, what genres they were in, etc.  I'll go back a post on her blog, since this past week she was at a conference and her numbers are a little off for her, but here's what she posted for the week of 5/7/2010:

# of queries read this week: 268
# of partials/manuscripts requested: 1
genre of partials/manuscripts requested: YA
400+ queries awaiting review
oldest query in the queue: 4/12/2010

ONE partial requested, out of 268 letters she read.  ONE. 

Now, you can go ahead and buck trends if you want.  Against those kinds of odds?  I'm doing everything humanly possible to make my first novel publishable.  I'll write my 250k word epic later, once I've established some cred.