Word Count - Page Count – What's a Novella?

With ebooks allowing stories to be published at any length, readers can become angry – and leave you a one-star review on Amazon! – if the story isn't as long as they think it should be, even when the story's length is part of the sales copy.  That 99 cent deal turned out to be only 10,000 words instead of the full length novel they thought they were buying.  While Amazon also gives an estimate for page length, I thought maybe it might be helpful to have a breakdown.  First what is the difference in a short story, a novelette, a novella, and a novel?

I hit the search engine and found all kinds of answers.  One of the first articles I came across was by Lee Masterson, a freelance writer from South Australia.  She placed the word count of a novella at 20,000-50,000.  If this was true, many novels published in the past aren't really novels.  I feel like this isn't quite it.

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America breaks it down like this:

Short story - 7,500 words or less

Novelette - 7,501-17,500 words (many editors simply lump this category into either the short story or the novella groupings)

Novella - 17,501-40,000 words

Novel - 40,001 or more words

So how does that break down into manuscript pages? Well, it depends on how many words you put on a page. I used to see several different formulas for calculating word length.

"You should count the words in X number of lines on a page, then average them, then multiply by the number of lines on a page, then multiply by the number of pages . . ."

"You should count all the words on X number of pages, then average them, then multiply by the number of pages . . ."

"You should count the words, but only count words that are three letters or longer . . ."

Writers, of course, had many important things to do back in those days – like getting a second cup of coffee or walking down to the mailbox to see if that blankety-blank publisher finally sent that check (some things never change) – so it's no wonder that they didn't want to sit around hunched over a typed page counting words. Because of that, the industry standard came to be, "Well, that looks like a normal page . . . margins are about right . . . dialogue's not excessive . . . 250 words!" The editors and publishers went along with that because, hey, it was easy to figure out. A thousand words every four pages meant a 200 page manuscript was 50,000 words, and all was right with the world.

Then computers came along with their accurate word counts, and all that went out the window. We discovered that books were often a little shorter than we thought they were. In some cases they were longer. Most normally typed pages run between 200 and 250 words, so the old rule of thumb wasn't really that far off. If you accept the SFWA's categories, that means (and we're doing some rounding here):

Short story – up to 35 pages

Novelette – 35 to 85 pages

Novella – 85 to 200 pages

Novel – 200 pages and up

I'm not sure the designation "novelette" really means much when it comes to ebook publishing. Sales copy tends to break down along "short story", "novella", and "novel" lines. I think of anything under 50 manuscript pages as a short story. 50 to 150 pages is a novella. Anything over 150 pages is a novel. For purposes of the Peacemaker Awards presented by Western Fictioneers, anything under 30,000 words falls into the Short Fiction category  (eliminating the need for extra categories) and anything above 30,000 is a novel.

When you're writing sales copy, I've learned that it's a good idea to give the reader as much information as possible. If your ebook a short story, say it's a short story. If it's a novella, say so – although you might want to specify that it's not a full-length novel, as the word "novella" might not mean anything to some readers. Go ahead and include the word count, although again, many readers may have no idea how many words are in a full-length novel. One of the best things to come out of the ebook surge is that it's possible to write and publish novellas again, a length that had become almost non-existent what with publishers wanting bigger and bigger books. So go ahead and tackle that novella you've been wanting to write. Just don't try to pass it off as a full-length novel, because somebody will complain if you do.

And if you are a reader and really enjoyed that 99 cent novella that was described as having 18,000 words , please be fair and don't give it a nasty 1 star review because it wasn't a full length novel.