How many words is the average modern novel?

MarkMono · 4th February 2009, 3:03pm

Where can I find this out?

All of the Brookmyre/Incident with the dog/Time-travellers ho/Ten peeps you meet in heaven-type novels seem to be about the same length.

XMachina · 4th February 2009, 3:18pm

There's an introduction to one of the Penguin editions of Clockwork Orange that discusses this. I think the figure was 100-200,000 words.

*LesMTS* · 4th February 2009, 3:20pm

No idea where you'd find that kind of statistic. You could produce one without much bother, though.

You could go to the bookshop/library, pick twenty or so books at random and work out a rough average pretty easily.

edit: looks like you'd find that kind of statistic in the penguin edition of Clockwork Orange

MarkMono · 4th February 2009, 3:21pm

When I say 'modern' I mean 'This century.'

endless psych · 4th February 2009, 3:27pm

Anything over 85,000 words

Another result via google:- http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question...3062455AASEf3k

MarkMono · 4th February 2009, 3:32pm

I'm going to download a bunch of Brookmyre books and let word do my counting for me.

I'd guess between 50'000 and 70'000.

JennyPiccolo · 4th February 2009, 5:42pm

i think they vary quite a lot more than that. I guess it depends on your plot and your target audience. I wouldn't really worry about the length over anything else, I'd lay out everything you want to cover in each chapter, and just take it from there.

MarkMono · 4th February 2009, 5:45pm

Done all that, halfway through I completely reshuffled the way the chapters ran and went from being on chapter 8 (of 12-13) to 4 (of 9-10. Maybe 11.).

The pacing shifts about all over the place within the story, but I want the overall pacing to be pretty fast and bare. And, considering I just cracked 100'000 words just over a third of the way through, I think I'm going to reshuffle everything again.

JennyPiccolo · 4th February 2009, 5:48pm

Then i'd maybe get someone else to read it for you, and take out all the bits that don't hold attention too well.

Zooropa · 4th February 2009, 6:44pm

In CSYS Stats I had to do a statstical analysis of the word count from contemporary novels (think I picked one of the bigger Terry Pratchett ones, possibly Mort?), and Great Expectations.

Good fun.

princessoPUNK · 4th February 2009, 10:19pm

For One More Day is about 50,000(200 pages of roughly 25 lines of 10 words) , and The Five People You Meet in Heaven is about the same, but they are fairly short books(albeit with alot in them) I reckon between that and 100,000 is about normal (allowing for books of200 - 400 pages).

Will_Couper · 8th March 2009, 5:40pm

Well, anything over 50,000 words is a novel. I know that something like Stephen King's 'It' or 'The Stand' would be over 300,000 words. I'm sure at least one of Neal Stephenson's monster books probably get close to 500,000 words.

A way of counting a book's word count is taking the number of lines per page, multiplying that by the number of pages and then multiplying by nine.

At a guess a paperback of about four hundred pages would be about 160,000 words, but it all depends on when the book was published, who published it, who the writer is and possibly even the genre.

In all honesty average word-count might not be a feasible question to ask without doing a great deal of maths.

Will

MarkMono · 8th March 2009, 5:54pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by Will_Couper

A way of counting a book's word count is taking the number of lines per page, multiplying that by the number of pages and then multiplying by nine.

Hmm, wouldn't the average number of words per line depend on the font used?

Will_Couper · 8th March 2009, 7:22pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by MarkMono

Hmm, wouldn't the average number of words per line depend on the font used?

Well, it's to take into account of the fact that every page of a novel isn't a solid block of text.

Of course you're only going to get a rough guide.

Will

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