Manuscript Length
If you have spent any time on the submission trail, you will notice that there are manuscript length guidelines for manuscripts that you may want to submit, and they are very category-specific. So, a lot of people will sort of expect manuscript lengths to be within these ranges of normal, even if they don't outright say it on their submission guidelines. I'm gonna do a run-through of children's books first, and then I’ll continue this discussion over in Good Story Learning so you can hear my thoughts about those higher word counts, too.
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transcript for manuscript length
Hello, my name is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. Today, I am tackling the very popular topic of manuscript length.
If you have spent any time on the submission trail, you will notice that there are manuscript length guidelines for manuscripts that you may want to submit, and they are very category-specific. So, a lot of people will sort of expect manuscript lengths to be within these ranges of normal, even if they don't outright say it on their submission guidelines. And those ranges really vary by, kind of, category and age range if you're talking about children's books. So let's do a run-through of children's books first.
Yes, there are many, many categories within the larger children's book space. So that's very, very important to know because sometimes, people who are new to the space, they will say, "I've written a children's book." And it's like the first question any professional in that space is gonna ask is, "Okay, great. What kind?" If you simply refer to your project as a children's book, take heed because you are about to learn a bunch of different categories.
Okay. Board book, 0 to 200 words. Board books, unless they're adapted from a picture book... Picture books do move down to the board book format sometimes. They can be a little bit longer but if it's original to board, 0 to 200 words, maybe even 0 to 150, or even 100. These are for the youngest readers. The books tend to be very, very short.
Picture book is divided, unofficially/officially, into two categories, kind of, 3 to 5, to 5 to 7 is the age range. Of course, board books are like 0 to 3, 0 to 2. Picture books have sort of a hard ceiling of 600 words for a lot of the fiction narratives and a lot of those younger picture books. You can write a longer picture book but your chances of selling a longer picture book are going to drop precipitously as the length of the picture book increases. You can do nonfiction picture books up to about 1200 or 1500 words, but realize that, at that point, you're talking more to like third graders to fifth graders, kind of, 7 to 10, or 8 to 10 on your age range. And the word counts there should include any after matter, any resource guides that you choose to include, any sidebars that you include in the text. But, for fiction picture books, 600 words and fewer is the gold standard.
You move up into early readers. Early readers are very, very difficult to sell. I have another video on this topic. They're very difficult to sell in terms of kind of debut an original work because a lot of those are written with license properties in mind. They're written in-house. They sit at about 1200 to 1500 words. The thing not to do is to refuse to cut down your picture book and then say, "Oh, fine. It's an early reader. Haha, I have worked my way around the guidelines." They are two very, very different things and so, I would not take that shortcut if I were you because early readers really have to do more with bridging kids into independent reading so a lot of the word choices, syntax choices, Lexile scores, all of these different things that you don't really think about in picture book do apply in early readers.
Chapter books can be about 3000 words on the skinny side to about 10,000, maybe 12,000 words on the longer side. They also act as a bridge into independent reading and so, some of these other considerations apply in chapter books of really, really short chapters, kind of simple sentence structure. The voice is very, very specific in chapter book but there is, kind of, a wider range of acceptable word count.
Middle grade, we see it like 25,000, 35,000 on the very, very early end of middle grade but that tends to be a bit of the exception rather than the rule. I'm starting to see a lot of middle grades that go up to 50,000, go up to even 60,000 words, especially when you have categories like historical, fantasy, science fiction, speculative, where you need to do a lot of world-building. Longer word counts are tolerated in those categories and maybe even expected, some would argue.
When you get into young adult, that tends to be anything 50,000 above. Although, I have heard from a lot of writers on the query trail that agents are coming back and saying, you know, "This is too short, 45,000, 50,000. Now, we want something closer to 60,000, 70,000 words." And, again, we go up to maybe 90,000, 95,000, I'm stopping short of 100,000 and I will talk about why in a little bit, 90,000, 95,000 words, especially in some of those historical, speculative, fantasy, science fantasy categories, again, where higher word counts are tolerated there because there is more information and world-building that you're baking into the manuscript.
When we go into the adult, meaning not erotic but non-children's world, I would say the bare, bare minimum for a fiction-length manuscript or novel-length fiction manuscript would be 50,000, 60,000 words. Memoir can be on a little bit of the lighter side of that, so 60,000, 70,000, 80,000 words. A lot of fiction tends to kind of thread that needle of 70,000, 80,000 words. There is a lot more variety in terms of word count. Novellas, small category, but you're talking, maybe 20,000, 30,000 words there. Again, the higher the word count, the more, kind of, world-building is expected or a lot of literary novels sort of go into the higher word counts. But I would still say 70,000, 80,000 is a really nice middle ground for a lot of commercial fiction, trade fiction. A memoir can be a little smaller than that because memoirs tend to be kind of hyper-focused but, of course, we can have very long memoirs as well. But I would say, if you are sort of aspiring to write a novel-length manuscript or a full book-length manuscript, 70,000 words is a really good thing to shoot for, kind of outside the children's space.
Nonfiction can be shorter. It can be about 50,000 words. Nonfiction also tends to be hyper-specialized into a niche category and so, you just may not have enough material to really bulk out. A nonfiction project, if it's sort of advice-driven or kind of very practical, like a parenting guide, of course, if you have a long nonfiction book with a lot of scholarly presence to it, you're probably gonna be in those higher word counts of 80,000, 90,000s.
Now, there is the 100,000. I haven't really touched it, but there is sort of the 100,000-word question, 100,000 and above. I'm gonna continue this discussion over in Good Story Learning so you can hear my thoughts about that, if you join our monthly membership with a ton of new content released every month, just for writers of all ability levels in all categories.
My name is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. Here's to a good story of appropriate length for submission.
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