Word count is one of those things new writers worry about but deny worrying about because we’re not supposed to be worrying about it. According to Wikipedia’s entry on word count, the typical word count of a novel is at least 80,000 words. I’ve heard through the publishing world grapevine than most agents and editors will generally take a query for a first novel more seriously if the word count is between 80,000 and 100,000.
Instead of sleeping, I compiled in an Excel sheet novels I read growing up. They’re mostly classics because those are the only ones where word count is easily obtained. More contemporary fiction would require more digging. I wouldn’t say I personally love every one of these books, but I would regard them as classics, as great novels in themselves, even if the particular author wasn’t that impressive of a writer.
Author — Book Title — Word Count
(in case it wasn’t obvious)
| Alan Paton | Cry, the Beloved Country | 83,774 |
| Alice Walker | The Color Purple | 66,556 |
| Amy Tan | The Kitchen God’s Wife | 159,276 |
| Amy Tan | Joy Luck Club | 91,419 |
| Ayn Rand | Atlas Shrugged | 561,996 |
| Ayn Rand | The Fountainhead | 311,596 |
| Betty Smith | A Tree Grows in Brooklyn | 145,092 |
| Charles Dickens | A Tale of Two Cities | 135,420 |
| Daniel Defoe | Moll Flanders | 138,087 |
| Emily Bronte | Wuthering Heights | 107,945 |
| Erich Remarque | All Quiet on the Western Front | 61,922 |
| Ernest Hemingway | The Sun Also Rises | 67,707 |
| Frank Norris | McTeague | 112,737 |
| Fyodor Dostoyevsky | Crime and Punishment | 211,591 |
| George Eliot | Middlemarch | 316,059 |
| George Orwell | Nineteen Eighty-Four | 88,942 |
| Harper Lee | To Kill A Mockingbird | 99,121 |
| Harriet Beecher Stowe | Uncle Tom’s Cabin | 166,622 |
| Henry David Thoreau | Walden | 114,634 |
| Honore de Balzac | Pere Goriot | 87,846 |
| J.D. Salinger | The Catcher in the Rye | 73,404 |
| James Fenimore Cooper | Last of the Mohicans | 145,469 |
| Jane Austen | Persuasion | 87,978 |
| John Knowles | A Separate Peace | 56,787 |
| John Steinback | The Grapes of Wrath | 169,481 |
| John Steinback | East of Eden | 225,395 |
| Joseph Heller | Catch-22 | 174,269 |
| Kurt Vonnegut | Slaughterhouse-Five | 49,459 |
| Kurt Vonnegut | Welcome to the Monkey House | 99,560 |
| Leo Tolstoy | War and Peace | 587,287 |
| Margaret Atwood | Alias Grace | 157,665 |
| Mark Twain | The Adventures of Huck Finn | 109,571 |
| Mark Twain | Life on the Mississippi | 127,776 |
| Maxine Hong Kingston | Woman Warrior | 70,957 |
| Milan Kundera | The Unbearable Lightness of Being | 85,199 |
| Nathaniel Hawthorne | The Scarlet Letter | 63,604 |
| Oscar Wilde | The Picture of Dorian Gray | 78,462 |
| Ray Bradbury | Fahrenheit 451 | 46,118 |
| Ray Bradbury | The Martian Chronicles | 64,768 |
| Toni Morrison | Song of Solomon | 92,400 |
| Virginia Woolf | Mrs. Dalloway | 63,422 |
| William Faulkner | As I Lay Dying | 56,695 |
| William Golding | Lord of the Flies | 59,900 |
The Stats:
Average word count of the Great Novels is 136,604 words. That’s like the literary institution’s recommended word count for first novels plus a long novella! But the arithmetic mean isn’t very helpful here because we’ve got some doozies on this list.
Median word count is 99,341 words. That’s longer than Wikipedia’s estimation of the typical novel length, but just about right as a target word count for budding novel writers.
Longest novel on the list is Tolstoy’s War and Peace (surprise, surprise) at 587,287 words. Note that Ayn Rand’s cult classic Atlas Shrugged isn’t that far behind, at 561,996 words.
Shortest novel on the list is Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, one of my personal favorites, at 46,118 words. Most of Hemingway’s novels make pretty slim books too.
Word count on the Bible, Old and New combined: 774,776 words according to Source A and 788,280 words in the King James according to Source B. But the Bible’s word count isn’t relevant here because first of all, it’s not by one author unless you want to go there with me and say it’s God and in that case, well, it’s God, so yeah.
Then again, considering the oeuvres of certain writers, like John Steinbeck, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Francine Prose, and even Amy Tan, they’ve already written way more than 700,000-ish words.
Need A Life:
I can’t believe I just sat here and compiled that list. By the way, I came up with each book off the top of my head, either by author name or by title. I wrecked my brains from the excursion. I need to go do something like shop for shoes or eat ice cream now…. Ugh.
Word count on past PEN/Faulkner Award winners:
| Chabon, Michael | The Amazing Adventures… | 216,020 |
| Banks, Russell | Cloudsplitter | 260,742 |
| Franzen, Jonathan | The Corrections | 196,774 |
| Cooper, Susan | The Dark Is Rising | 82,143 |
| Danticat, Edwidge | The Dew Breaker | 60,082 |
| Phillips, Caryl | A Distant Shore | 103,090 |
| Packer, ZZ | Drinking Coffee Elsewhere | 68,410 |
| Robinson, Marilynne | Gilead | 84,845 |
| Cunningham, Michael | The Hours | 54,243 |
| Kennedy, William | Ironweed | 67,606 |
| McMurtry, Larry | Lonesome Dove | 365,712 |
| Kingsolver, Barbara | The Poisonwood Bible | 177,679 |
| Guterson, David | Snow Falling on Cedars | 138,098 |
| Hegi, Ursula | Stones from the River | 197,517 |
| Canales, Viola | The Tequila Worm | 42,715 |
| Jin, Ha | Waiting | 89,297 |
| Jin, Ha | War Trash | 130,460 |
A few surprises here. I thought Ha Jin’s Waiting was longer than 89,000 words because that book lumbered like some sort of literary elephant and took me more than one night to read. Normally books don’t take me more than one night to read. I’m also surprised at the brevity of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours.
Thus far, I have about the same word count as Danticat’s Dew Breaker, but the characters have a lot more work to do before the end.
Word count on novels that fall under Amazon.com’s category of “Asian American Literary Fiction”:
Title–Author–Wordcount
| A Gesture Life | Chang-Rae Lee | 112995 |
| Native Speaker | Chang-Rae Lee | 108568 |
| Aloft | Chang-Rae Lee | 112481 |
| The Tapestries | Kien Nguyen | 107251 |
| The Village Bride of Beverly Hills | Kavita Daswani | 65450 |
| In Full Bloom | Caroline Hwang | 91577 |
| Breaking the Tongue | Vyvyane Loh | 135294 |
| Zen Attitude | Sujata Massey | 76157 |
| Queen of Dreams | Chitra Divakaruni | 93176 |
| Buddha Baby | Kim Wong Keltner | 80032 |
| The Dim Sum of All Things | Kim Wong Keltner | 81994 |
| Pastries | Bharti Kirchner | 101217 |
| Mambo Peligroso | Patricia Chao | 93491 |
| Somebody’s Daughter | Marie Myung-Ok Lee | 87811 |
| The Island of Bicycle Dancers | Jiro Adachi | 77821 |
| One Hundred Million Hearts | Kerry Sakamoto | 73996 |
| Dream Jungle | Jessica Hagedorn | 90764 |
| The Gangster of Love | Jessica Hagedorn | 90909 |
| Long Stay in a Distant Land | Chieh Chieng | 59856 |
| Beijing Doll | Chun Sue | 59913 |
| Shanghai Baby | Wei Hui | 79507 |
| Invisible Lives | Anjali Banerjee | 55328 |
| The People’s Republic of Desire | Annie Wang | 106032 |
| Candy | Mian Mian | 80434 |
| The Space Between Us | Thrity Umrigar | 102992 |
| Transparency | Frances Hwang | 65817 |
| Kept: A Comedy of Sex and Manners | Y. Euny Hong | 81287 |
| Typical American | Gish Jen | 79105 |
| Hundred Secret Senses | Amy Tan | 117799 |
| When the Emperor Was Divine | Julie Otsuka | 34381 |
| Becoming Madame Mao | Anchee Min | 104979 |
| Empress Orchid | Anchee Min | 134598 |
| The Inheritance of Lost | Kiran Desai | 106698 |
| Country of Origin | Don Lee | 84335 |
| Snow Flower and the Secret Fan | Lisa See | 99945 |
| Interpreter of Maladies | Jhumpa Lahiri | 62164 |
| The Namesake | Jhumpa Lahiri | 104172 |
| Free Food for Millionaires | Min Jin Lee | 207907 |
| The Woman Warrior | Maxine Hong Kingston | 69989 |
| Sons of Heaven | Terrence Cheng | 86681 |
| When My Sister was Cleopatra Moon | Frances Park | 56480 |
| American Son | Brian Ascalon Roley | 54858 |
| My Year of Meats | Ruth L. Ozeki | 104746 |
| When the Elephants Dance | Tess Uriza Holthe | 164718 |
| Night of Many Dreams | Gail Tsukiyama | 79151 |
| The Language of Threads | Gail Tsukiyama | 83953 |
| Lost Names | Richard E. Kim | 64073 |
(Not including the books named in other tables above that would count as “APA Literature”)
The fact I sat here and not only read it, but studied each word count carefully shows that I need a life too
Very nicely done and tallied.
I bookmarked your page because I love this list! I am obsessed with wordcount–obsessed–and am always curious how I compare to the “famous guys.” Your list only fuels my obsession. Thank you.
Just a random note, Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of short stories.
Yes, indeed. Sorry, I should have included an asterisk and footnote. Hi Justin! (Yes I authored this blog but the website link with the reply name is different because I’ve since moved on to other projects, namely the project you see documented on the blog that is the link.)
Hi,
I am currently writing a novel which may make it upto 65 K at the most. Does this mean it does not fall in the publishable category for a first time writer?
Thanks,
Ritesh
Try to get it to 100k. Remember something; take it deeper. Your dialogue, your action sequences – take them further and deeper, push them. Cutting words is easier than adding new ones.
This list helped me a ton! It’s amazing what you can find on the internet! Thanks.
This compilation task may have made you miserable and/or crazy, but it’s extremely useful. I’m re-reading a draft of a novel I finished recently and it clocks in at about 250,000 words. Since I know, for example, that it is no Crime and Punishment, it’s clear that I need to hack the thing to bits. I appreciate your work here.
Linus
“I can’t believe I just sat here and compiled that list.”
But thank you for doing it all the same. It was exactly what I was looking for.
This is a really interesting project! Can I ask where you found these word counts? My book club is curious to know if our failure to finish some books is really an issue of books being too long to complete in the time we have, so they’re interested in knowing the word count of a book before choosing it.
My favorite books are all in the higher word count range! Hm.
I know of an FF author who hit nearly 2mil words o.o
Great post! Just fell upon it from a google search on word count, but EXTREMELY informative, unsettling in some ways, and comforting in others. Thanks for the time you put into it!!
Where did you find your word count data?
What is the word count on Dan Brown’s three best selling novels?
I know you compiled these stats over 18months ago but still the closet answers concerning word counts on the classic novels I grew up reading. Check out the original short stories and accompanying original dj’d soundtracks at http://www.132daysofdarkness.com . There is a new story and mix we do everyday since November 1 and plan on going for 132 days (should be staying light later by then and can back outside doing physical stuff)
thanks again.
-leon “dj murj” murray
Hi Blue,
Was randomly googling word counts for published novels, just to get a sort of baseline for comparison, and I came across your very informative and interesting list.
Just wanted to say thanks! I’m at 45,000 words now, with probably another 25,000-ish left in me, so we’ll see how it goes.
Again, thanks for the time and effort!
Dave
I’ve spent ages tracking down word counts when planning my novel, I really wish I’d found your page first! This is my first work of fiction so I’m aiming for about 60,000 words.
Your website is awesome, btw. (This is the author of this blog. I’ve been MIA because I started this blog then dropped it and then forgot all about it until now.) I, too, love cats. Good luck on your first work of fiction. I plan on buying a copy when you’re published! So keep me posted!
Fascinating. Thanks for compiling that (and to Google for indexing it)! I was getting all insecure about a novel that’s unlikely to break 60,000, but now I feel better. Cheers.
i am pretty sure that is not a correct word count for The Hours — can i ask where you got your info for that? thanks!
It’s true I can’t guarantee that the wordcounts here are accurate. I relied on several teacher websites that provided word counts on books so that teachers can plan their syllabi accordingly. Also, for a short while, Amazon was posting word count info, but they don’t do it anymore, no clue why.
Hey thanks for posting this!
Thanks
this post was really helpful! Well worth the lack of sleep (well for me anyway 
[...] Do you remember my “Secret Project”, or Nevermore? (Which is really just a working title, I need to come up with something else so I can stop feeling like an E.A. Poe fangirl and feel more like a proper writer.) Anyway, I’ve taken up work on it a bit more vigorously in the past week or two and I’m quite excited. I’m past the 10k word mark and I don’t feel like I’m even close to finished. That’s a good thing, in case anyone was wondering. The recommended word count for a first time author (by agents and publishers) is somewhere between 60 and 80k. By comparison Tolstoy’s War and Peace is just over 587k words heavy. (A list of other famous and/or heavy books and their word counts can be found here.) [...]
Help! Trying to get word count for New York the Novel, by
Rutherfurd. (SP?) Thanks.
Thank you for all your work. I’ve been trying to find word count on various books for some time. You went thru a lot of work on my behalf, and I am grateful.
I am a writer, and also work in a library, so this info will be helpful to others as well.
Thanks again,
Ally
Great list! Thanks. Immediately compared my progress to sun also rises. I know the story should take itself where it needs to go, but I was obsessed with making sure I had enough breadth in this thing..
Wow… I feel I have lacked in the insomnia production area… Thanks for the list
I’m so glad you made this list of novel lengths. It’s a shame they won’t take a novel shorter than 80K seriously, there are some good ones shorter, as proved by your list. So, thank you!!
Very useful info… time well spent!
I want to add my thanks to your slightly obsessive qualities…much appreciated!
Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I found myself scanning the word count list for the shortest numbers. My heart was racing and my palms are a little sweaty. Upon seeing 42, 715 my thoughts were as follows:
Hah!
Thank God!
I will be way longer than that.
But, oh my God, that’s such a minimum.
If I’m only several thousand over I’ll never get published.
Don’t stress, you’re doing well.
Shut up! Stress is healthy.
And, finally: details.
Thanks for being so obsessive =]]
Just wanted to say a big thank you for providing this information. I actually have a life, but I think you underestimate your own value. This was such a useful little service you performed that I wish I’d thought of it. There you are you must have a life: I actually envy you.
This was very useful. I echo the comments of others. Moran Taing (Many Thanks)
The only one I’ve written to date was a little over 35,000 words, which probably makes it nearer a novella.
Any Dickens apart from Hard Times, Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities must be at or above 200,000 words. The Brothers Karamazov must be close to twice the length of Crime and Punishment, but I’d have to look it up I suppose.
Having written as co-author an absolutely ‘brilliant’ first time novel of 172,000 words; I guess I stand little chance of it ever being published other than as an e-book. It’s just too long
This is great! Thanks. Where do you get these counts from! Fantastic. I’ve been hunting for One Hundred Years of Solitude word count…you have that by any chance?
Thank you for making this list! Must have been a lot of work, and it is greatly appreciated.
Thank you for this information, it’s very helpful.
I’ve been an international clown soloist a couple of decades and have written 26 short story based in an alphabetical framework combined with towns and cities I’ve performed in. [Auckland/barcelona/chicago etc)
It’s taken 15 years off and on and I’m going to finish the project by the end of the month.
It’s 42 000,
Any idea what do do with it once finished?
ListVerse compiled a list of the ten longest novels in the English language that includes some not so great novels, like Mission Earth by L. Ron Hubbard clocking in at an insane 1.2 million words.
It does, however, include my favorite novel at number ten: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace with 484,001 words.
[...] Great Novels and Word Count – A WordPress article with an impressively long list of the wordcounts of a number of classic novels. [...]
[...] Great Novels and Their Word Count (via Indefeasible) [...]
[...] a crazy, word count obsessed writer like me (and admit it, you are) you should definitely check out this post from a blog called indefeasible (don’t worry, I had to look up that word too). It’s [...]
Very helpful–and fascinating. Thank you!!
My novel in progress is at 113,000 with two chapters remaining. I can see I’ll be doing a very tight edit to bring it down to no more than 99,000 words.
I want to give my book its best chance of success.
Wow! Great work. Very helpful to show to outsiders who don’t understand what, say, 110,000 words means.
[...] Indefeasible provides a great list for you to check out… [...]
[...] I went blog-seeking for more input, and author Thomas Taylor wisely pointed out that a novel is only long if it feels long. The blog Editorial Ass lends commercial advice, mentioning how shorter works are more desirable as they’re less expensive to produce. The Indefeasible blog points out how agents prefer work to be between 80K and 100K words — and als…. [...]
You are my hero! Your work will be of great benefit to me and in all that I aspire to achieve.
You can go to this site http://www.renlearn.com/store/quiz_home.asp
and type in just about any well-known novel you can think of and get its word count, including the above novels and the exact wordcounts as the author of the lists has.
P.S. As well as the reading level of the vocabulary, i.e. fourth grade level, fifth grade, sixth and three months, etc.
By the way, the exact same lists, because you can search by awards, asian lit, etc, so looks like this writer’s source was this site alone. http://www.renlearn.com/store/quiz_home.asp.
I went to this site and had my eyes opened. I was under the impression this researcher had a done a ton of work to get compile this data. Now I believe I handed out the “hero” badge prematurely. It is herewith rescinded, null and void and all that jazz.
Novelas con mayor número de palabras en alfabetos occidentales .
1º Mark Leach, Marienbad My Love (contiene aproximadamente 17.000.000 palabras)
2º Nigel Tomm, The Blah Story (contiene aproximadamente 11.300.000 palabras).
3º Mohiuddin Nawab, Devta (contiene aproximadamente 11.200.000 palabras escrita en urdu).
4º H. Balzac, La comedia humana (contiene 95 partes más 48 partes inacabadas, contiene aproximadamente 11.000.000 palabras).
5º Henry Darger, The Story of The Vivian Girls, in […] (contiene aproximadamente 11.000.000 de palabras).
6º J.M.M. Caminero, Soliloquios o Enciclopedia Filosofía (15 volúmenes o tomos, 15.000 páginas, contiene aproximadamente 11.000.000 palabras).
7º Robert Jordan completado por Brandon Sanderson, Wheel of Time fantasy series (contiene aproximadamente 3.400.000 palabras).
8º Marija Jurić Zagorka, Gordana (contiene aproximadamente 5.700 páginas, aproximadamente 2.300.000 palabras).
9º Benito Pérez Galdós, Episodios Nacionales (46 tomos, contiene aproximadamente 2.200.000 palabras).
10º Madeleine y Georges de Scudéry, Artamène o El gran Ciro (contiene aproximadamente 2.100.000 palabras).
Very much appreciated, my friend. This is the best resource I’ve found on this subject.
Great list. I thank you. I’m writing my novel (isn’t everyone) and I was worried it was going to be too short. The story doesn’t lend itself to a gargantuan length, but I was consoled to see my favourite book ‘Slaughter House Five’ is just 49,459. No need to pointlessly pad it out then I guess…
[...] If you’re worried about your Word Count, and umming and ahing over whether your first novel is long enough to seriously catch the eye of a publisher, this blog post is definitely work a check. Compare your word count with a selection of the ‘great novels’, and make your own conclusions about the perfect length of a novel. A brilliant resource of information, all in one place! C-C xxx Word count is one of those things new writers worry about but deny worrying about because we're not supposed to be worrying about it. According to Wikipedia's entry on word count, the typical word count of a novel is at least 80,000 words. I've heard through the publishing world grapevine than most agents and editors will generally take a query for a first novel more seriously if the word count is between 80,000 and 100,000. Instead of sleeping, … Read More [...]
[...] kommer en lista på en bunt olika (mestadels klassiska) böckers längd i ord som jag hittade här. Det här är visserligen böcker på engelska, och en del är dessutom översatta, men mellan [...]
I’m working on a new novel each month so to say I’m word-count
(and page-count) obsessed is putting it mildly. Thank you so much for this post! I was feeling like my goal (180 pages or 50,000 words) was pretty measly until I saw it’s not to far off some of the gems of literature! You made my day!
May I ask where did you get the website with these wordcounts?
Thanks for this list – I’ve been real curious about this.
invadermyna – here’s an educational site that has word counts.
http://www.renlearn.com/store/quiz_home.asp
Just put in the title and hit search.
Thanks very much for giving me my word count target. You’ll be in my acknowledgement page. (narcissistic personality disorder anyone?)
Hi, any estimate on the acceptable word count for debut literary fiction?
Just for fun, the standard error on the mean in the first list is 16959.5 words.
That if you want to talk stats on the classic novels than the mean is:
136604+/-16959.5*1.96
So the error tells us that classic novels are above (by 3000 words) the 80,000 – 100,000 word count recommendation with a 95% confidence interval.
I’m writing my first novel and already have 84,000 and I’m not sure I’m half done. What I see from your lists is that just about any word count works.
Thanks for all your research. I’m glad to know that a novel with 50,000 to 60,000 words is a novel, not a novella.
My problem is that I am so caught in the plot… It’s just hard for me to stop and hook it to the next book. I’ve wrote six books all over 200k. Mine are in the sci-fi/romance genre. I would like to go by a pen name, or even my initials. That way when it bombs I can hang my head down in pure shame.
Everyone has offered their services in reading my books… I would find saying to myself, “That doesn’t sound right!”.. Click on the file button and click delete. I also have trashed all six of them. This drives my husband bonkers, but hey… I’m a perfectionist. If something doesn’t clash, I trash.
I begin again with even more conviction, and never really had a fight with writer’s block… I just ignore everyone including my deprived husband just to get a story out. I’m working on three different series, and three different perspectives. Eventually all the characters will mingle at some point. This is the most ambitious task yet, but it’s never been done either… So, how about my favorite Sci-Fi writers… Stephen King and Anne Rice. Where’s their word counts at???
Good work – thank you!
One of my elementary school teachers told the class that Tolstoy lost track of at least one character and had him die early in the novel and then show up again later on. I was so impressed by this. One day I’ll have the time to read War and Peace and I’ll find out.
very interesting, thanks. Stumbled across this while trying to find what is the average word count for a novel, to help me come up with an idea of how long it might take to proof-read someone’s book.
Tim Cote
My debut novel is at 123,000+ so far and its probably 90% finished. I have started to become obsessed with word count, wanting to finish it off. But seeing others have way higher counts I feel like I should just finish it off then try and winnow it down from there. What a trip.
[...] many words are normally in a book, there’s no context for comparison. To remedy this, I found a chart online listing the word counts of some classic books, then created the graph below which shows how The [...]
Just a historical note — Charles Dickens didn’t write novels, he wrote serials. He wrote episodes which were published in newspapers, and he was paid by the word count. When Dickens reached the final episode in a serialization, he published the accumulated episodes as a novel.
He received 3 incomes from each of his works. First he was paid for the serial episodes, then he was paid for the sales of the novels, and finally he had a lucrative career reading his novels in concert halls. In his heyday, he was Britain’s most popular public performer.
Envision Stephen King filling Carnegie Hall to SRO every weekend with people coming to hear him read episodes from his books.
[...] your sixty, seventy, eighty-thousand word baby (562,000 if you’re Ayn Rand. Yep, that’s how long Atlas Shrugged is) you’ve finally made it through a complete draft, and now you’re basically going to [...]
Great stuff. Just what I needed on a wet day in a Aussie town when the word count is going backwards rather than forwards.
I cannot believe you did this, because I was going to, but you saved me the effort! Excellent.
Where did you find this information anyway???
[...] to see the list in order.) For average word counts based on genre, see this handy reference. Also, here’s another list I may swipe and add in [...]
Thanks for the word counts. My tome weighs in at 198,000 and since discovering your list, I’ve spent days looking at how to slash it without distorting the main character’s evolution. I suppose I will have to drop certain side characters and their story lines. Help.
[...] my wittier mentors described as “three thousand words shorter than any novel ever published.” Not actually true, but her point is a good one. “K”, on the other hand, thinks the market for shorter books is [...]
[...] People write some long novels. James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans is 145,469 words long. Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead 311,596. And, of course, as the king of long novels, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is 587,287. With most novels clocking in around 100,000 words (give or take 20,000), Tolstoy has arguably written six books in one, and Rand a one-book trilogy (with the shorter of her two most famous works). [...]
Thanks for your listing these.
[...] 100,000-word target for novel length is not completely arbitrary. The blog Indefeasible has helpfully provided the word counts of dozens of classic novels and of more recent novels that [...]
[...] 8. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger: 70,544 (source) [...]
[...] 8. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger: 70,544 (source) [...]
[...] 8. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger: 70,544 (source) [...]
My coder is trying to persuade me to move to .net from PHP. I have always disliked the idea because of the expenses. But he’s tryiong none the less. I’ve been using WordPress on a number of websites for about a year and am nervous about switching to another platform. I have heard excellent things about blogengine.net. Is there a way I can transfer all my wordpress posts into it? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I loved, loved, loved this information. Though a budding English teacher and future mesmerizer by my pen, I am also a lover of math, formula, and theory. I enjoy the idea that there may be a proper way in which to follow the makings of a great, true novel. As in the study of the hero archetype, I find the rules and constructual techniques to literature fascinating. I actually never thought of word-count as a criteria, but thank you for opening new doors for me.
This is great, thank you! I’m working on my first novel and this was very helpful.
Word count is necessary in writing books because the capacity of the reader is limited while reading. I personally get bored when I read very long books. Yet, sometimes we find some stories not fully completed, that’s why we should in this case look for the second or third part of the work.
i a word count could be very useful, and i feel bad that you had to labor so hard to find these stats, but isnt there an easier way out there? what im looking for now is some word frequencies
Reblogged this on anauthorslife.
[...] http://indefeasible.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/great-novels-and-word-count/ [...]
I am a first time writer, I am only fifteen years old, and I have been writing my novel for two years now. My current word count is 178,960. I am shortening the book anyway, but do you think that’s too much?
Hey man. I’m a fifteen year old pen, too. To me, it isn’t a matter of how many words you have, but how you use them! I only have over 50,000 words and growing, but I feel it’s how you string the words together. I stumbled across this site because I wanted to know if I was completely unrealistic in the direction of my book. Some of those novels included in the charts are painstaking reads and when I came to find that they were only 60,000-ish words, I was shocked. To me as a teen, I don’t want to read a book with a certain word count or length, I want to read a GOOD book.
[...] It’s been a year already, wow, time flies. It would seem my fingers have been flying too, with 58,728 words typed so far. Yep, I guess I’ve written a book. [...]
Excellent. I am so stoked after seeing this list. Thanks so much. I don’t think my million words, pared down to just over 100,000 is too far off the mark. My son’s had a helluva life, Russian-novel worthy. Hope I am doing him justice.
[...] reading this article, I’m still a bit astonished that mine is longer (300k+ and counting) than most of the [...]
This list has been very helpful. Thanks.
[...] mean, it was obviously the first draft, and a short 25K at that, which compares to the 46,118 word end result. This also bares out in the following: Ballantine editor Stanley Kauffman, later the [...]
[...] contained close to one thousand place-names and stretched more than 67,000 words (or, longer than Mrs. Dalloway, Fahrenheit 451, and All Quiet on the Western Front). I needed a middle ground. I decided to move backwards, from the machine-readable text of the [...]
[...] I reached the 100,000 word mark in this space, I began looking at word counts for well-known books and novels. I had passed George Orwell’s 1984 by that point, which I still consider as the most engaging [...]
[...] contained close to one thousand place-names and stretched more than 67,000 words (or, longer than Mrs. Dalloway, Fahrenheit 451, and All Quiet on the Western Front). I needed a middle ground. I decided to move backwards, from the machine-readable text of the [...]
[...] or fall surprisingly short of that meaningless range, as pointed out in the article compiled by Indefeasible. On a list of 42 classic novels you are sure to recognize if you’ve been paying attention at [...]
Size doesn’t really matter, if the matter is worth reading. I’m a former English teacher, so I like to read. The only thing one of these lists confirmed to me was that “The Kitchen God’s Wife” was too long! But if a writer is considering marketability of a first novel, perhaps averages matter. If a writer is considering sale of rights/options for film, then novellas are the way to go.
[...] thought was borderline: as short as I could make it while getting away with it. Fahrenheit 451 was approx. 46K, after all, which is still considered a novel but is even more borderline, I [...]
[...] favorite classics? I was too, so I found this great post from 2008 that I have bookmarked which details the word counts for some of my favorite works of literature including Crime and Punishment, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, and [...]
I know this is old, but I found this list to be super helpful!
I’m writing the final scenes of my novel, and I think I’m going to land in about the 140,000 words range. Not too bad to be in the company of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
I just hope half the words aren’t garbage. :/
There’s no tried or true answer. Meet the publishers guidelines and create a good story.
A science fiction readre for fifty years, I’ve begun a task of reading the “‘great books “, beginning with collecting ten lists of great(est) books (novels) published on the Web and removing all duplicates, then adding books referenced in the introductions of ones Iive read and incidental sources I come across. The list to date contains 603 items, of which I have word counts–mainly from Amazon–for 361. Try as I might I am stumped at that point. The statistics for the 361: shortest-The Twits, Roald Dahl (8,200); longest-Atlas Shrugged (645,000); average-143,000; median-114,000; 50% range around the median-67,000 to 176,000. I expect that filling in the remaining word counts would narrow the ranges a bit, but that the list is biased by it’s “great works” nature. A thousand books taken at random from current book sales lists or best seller lists over the last decade or three might have a significantly narrower around a median not much different. Note, also, the length you found for Atlas Shrugged (562,000) is a bit different from my finding (645,000). In today’s digital age one would think word counts would be more precise; or are various editions so different?
[...] 1, 2, [...]
Good night. Not many seem to have the problem I do, which is I’ve reached just over 41,000 words and the story is done, I can’t think of what I would include that wouldn’t be superfluous. Hmm.
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[...] in 466 posts (an average of 38.3 per month). For comparison, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead has 311,596 words. The table below lists the most popular posts (measured purely by page views in that month only) [...]
Thanks for the lists – very useful! Everything is great except where you wrote it usually takes you one night to read a book – when I read that I couldn’t help thinking, “Oh, this guy’s an ass.” I didn’t mean to think that, I just automatically did. Other than that, great stuff!
Thank you for doing this survey. I have about 48,000 words of a first draft and had no clue if I was anywhere close to novel length. After working great for awhile I was slowing down like a runner hitting a wall, but feeling like I was maybe only a third of the way there. Believe it or not I was going off the page count from Word and thought I was way farther behind. I was surprised and delighted to see that I’m actually in range of some of the shorter novels on the list – in word count, at least. Thanks again – you lightened me up a lot.
[...] Min kompis Manne Fagerlind, författare till ”Berg har inga rötter” skickade den här utmärkta länken till mig häromdagen. http://indefeasible.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/great-novels-and-word-count/ [...]
[...] Min kompis Manne Fagerlind, författare till “Berg har inga rötter” skickade den här utmärkta länken till mig häromdagen: http://indefeasible.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/great-novels-and-word-count/ [...]
[...] that’s so long as to be impractical. (For what it’s worth, here’s an interesting post on word-lengths of famous [...]
Very good information. Lucky me I came across your
website by chance (stumbleupon). I’ve saved it for later!
How do you retain anything at all or get anything of value out of a 90,000 word novel that you devour in one night? I’m just curious.
This was exactly what I needed. Thank you for taking the time to put it together and thank you to all the excellent comments. I am just starting an alternate history novel and this will come in handy as I plug away.
[...] installments in All the Year Round, Dickens’ own literary magazine (put together, the book is an estimated 135,420 words!). More recently, Stephen King released The Green Mile in six sections before compiling it as a [...]
Question: I’m writing a book that I was planning on making a trilogy, but the first book is turning out too short, but if i combine all three books it will be too long for a first time author. Any advise?
Write the book. Finish the book. Send it away
Thank you so much for this. This is way better information than Wikipedia. I wish you great success with your books. I’m using 100k word count for mine. I need a good number and that seems like a solid start.
Cheers!
June
[...] certainly not for me to say. But, if it’s numbers you’re after, check out this blog post. It’s a feast of words [...]
Wow. thank you.
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