She is on faculty for Science & Nature Writing for Kids & Teens. Miranda is an award-winning author of more than a dozen fiction and nonfiction books for children. So should you write short or long? There is no correct answer.īut I have an inkling that if you count words, shorter is better when it comes to ebooks.Special thanks to Miranda Paul for this guest post. It is a method that is especially suited to self-help books. There are some writers who are now bundling blog posts together to create quick Kindle ebooks. You should take a guide from the generally accepted word count totals for your particular genre.īut if you are self-publishing ebooks, then you can forget the rules and make your own.Įxperiment, try to see what works and what doesn’t. If you are taking the traditional publishing route, then yes. The decision you make about the ideal word count for your novel is not an easy one. Balancing your ebook price or subscription return against the number of words in your book is a calculation only you can make. Sure, you can use the generally accepted count for specific genres.īut I would say that you have much more flexibility when it comes to your ebooks. There is no right or wrong length for an ebook. It could also be because screen reading is not as comfortable as reading a print book. Maybe it has something to do with attention span or when and how an ebook reader reads. But there has been a noticeable trend towards ebook readers preferring shorter reads. But only if you hook a new reader with your first book in the series. Then you have a good chance of selling at $2.99 or even $3.99.įor a return on your word count, the lower price should return more for you.
#Famous books word count series#
Your list price for your ebook will struggle to sell at a price above $4.99.īut you could divide up your story into a three ebook series of 40,000 words each. Say you write a classic crime thriller of say 120,000 words. Should you opt-out of subscriber reading and focus on real ebook unit sales? If you check your KDP sales dashboard, you will know about this reading trend.Įbook reading creates many challenges and questions about how many words you should write in a novel. They can flit from one book to another, reading a few pages here and a few pages there. However, subscriber readers don’t necessarily read a whole book. It is still arguable that Amazon can’t count by the number of words read in an ebook.īut in the end, the more words in your ebook, the more you should earn from KU page reads. You are selling 187 words per page with KU, and you hope that KDP gets the calculation right. If you enroll your ebooks into KDP Select, you earn royalties by page reads and not by the number of ebooks you sell. The thicker, the better, because there is more room for the title and author name.īut how thick is an ebook? And where is the spine?Īmazon self-publishing with Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) has changed everything.Įven more challenging for authors is adapting to ebook subscriber reading with Kindle Unlimited (KU). Word count dictates the number of pages in a print book, and this defines the spine thickness.īecause the spine is so important in how a novel presents on a bookstore shelf, thick is good. In many ways, it is about market expectation by book buyers who browse for a new book in a brick and mortar bookstore. The guidelines for the length of a novel are usually based on the traditional publishing model. Publishing today is tipping all the average book length rules upside down and then giving them a shake for good measure. But, sadly, it appears to have been removed. Note: The image above first appeared on Savannah Gilbo’s website. If you are writing for early readers, then up to 3,000 words is the top of the range.Ĭhapter books, or Chapbooks, often stop well before 10,000 words.įor a quick overview, this infographic is a good guide to book word count averages. Say what you have to say in as many or few words as it takes to cover your topic.įor a picture book, 200 to 300 words are about the limit. There are no strict guidelines for this genre. However, an acceptable length is generally within the range of 75,000 to 110,000 words. There are many sub-genres to this category.
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