If you’re here because of How Not To Write A Novel, a book I wrote with Sandra Newman, you’ll probably want to visit our website for the book, here.
If you’re interested in having me work with you on your book, you can find out a bit about me and how that would work. You can also just get in touch, possibly for reasons I haven’t anticipated.
How long is my novel supposed to be?
Most commercial novels, substantial but not intimidatingly long, are 75,000 to 100,000 words, which is about 300 to 400 double-spaced manuscript pages. A slim genre novel might run 55,000 to 70,000 words, and YA novels can be as short as 40 to 45,000, with a new upper limit of Harry Potter.
A double-spaced page in 12-point Times New Roman, with standard one-inch margins, is about 250 words. Books about writing used to tell you to count the words in a handful of lines to come up with an average line-length, then multiply that by the number of lines on the page in order to get a rough page estimate, then repeat this for a number of pages to figure out an average word count per page, then multiply that by the number of pages to arrive at the word count of your manuscript.
As every aspiring novelist knows, keeping a running tally of your word count is an integral part of the workday. This made counting words an important method of avoiding actual writing in the days before technology advanced to when you can play with fonts or change the theme on your blog or see what everybody else is doing on Facebook and easily get through entire days without doing any writing at all.
If you do manage to write something, the above figures are the traditional lengths for trade publishing. Publishers are used to producing and selling books at these lengths, and readers are used to buying those books. The switch to ebooks might be changing all this. Distribution costs are the same for a 30,000 word novella as they are for a 200,000 word epic. Readers are getting used to buying individual short stories, like a single song on iTunes. For now, though, you decrease your chances, however marginally, of selling your book if you do not give people what they are used to getting.
That said, unless you have already signed a contract that specifies word count, you should write until you have finished telling your story. If you write a good enough book, somebody will figure out how to publish it.
How do I format a novel for submission?
Double-spaced; one-inch margins; do not print on both sides of the page.
The preferred font is 12-point Times New Roman. Do not use any unusual or interesting fonts; do not use colors other than black.
Number your pages sequentially; that is, do not start from one at the beginning of each chapter. Along with the page number, you should identify your manuscript by putting your last name, or the name of the novel, in the header.
Paragraphs should be indented. Don’t put an extra line space between paragraphs.
Do not bind or staple the manuscript. In movies, you’ll sometimes see manuscripts in a binder, or otherwise assembled into the form of a book, but that’s because the people who made the movie are used to screenplays. Screenplays are presented in a binder, but novels are never bound. A rubber band is helpful, though.
