These categories aren't laws — they're conventions that publishers, competitions and readers broadly share. Knowing them tells you what expectations you're walking into.
The categories, by word count
Flash fiction: under 1,000 words. A complete story, usually a single moment.
Short story: 1,000–7,500. The standard unit of literary magazines.
Novelette: 7,500–17,500. Mostly a competition category; readers rarely use the word.
Novella: 17,500–40,000. A real form with a real audience, and an excellent length for a first book.
Novel: 40,000+. The floor is around 50,000 in practice for most publishers.
Epic: 120,000+. Common in fantasy, rare and risky elsewhere.
Rule of thumb: a printed page holds roughly 250–300 words. An 80,000-word novel is about 300 pages.
What each genre actually expects
Romance: 70,000–90,000. Thriller and mystery: 70,000–90,000. Literary fiction: 70,000–100,000. Science fiction and fantasy: 90,000–120,000, with more tolerance at the top. Young adult: 55,000–80,000. Middle grade: 30,000–55,000. Memoir: 70,000–90,000.
Debut authors are held closer to these than established ones. A 180,000-word first novel is a hard sell not because it's bad but because it's expensive to print and risky to buy.
Why the number matters less than you think
Length is a symptom, not a target. Books that feel too long are almost never too many words — they're too many words doing nothing. And a book that comes in short usually hasn't earned its ending yet.
Write the story properly, then check the number. If you're 30,000 words over your genre's range, that's a signal to look at structure, which is what self-editing pass one is for. If it's 30,000 under, something is being summarised that should be dramatised.
Serialising changes the maths entirely
All of the above comes from print economics: paper, shelf space, printing cost. Online, none of it applies. A serialised story can run 400,000 words if readers keep coming back, and it can be a 25,000-word novella nobody would have printed as a standalone.
What matters instead is chapter length — roughly 1,500–3,000 words is the comfortable range for reading on a phone, long enough to be satisfying, short enough to fit a commute. On Arwy you publish a chapter at a time, so the total is whatever the story turns out to be.
If the real question underneath this is "is my book long enough to count", it is. See how to finish the book you started.
However long it is — publish it a chapter at a time. Start on Arwy.
Writing something yourself? Everything we know about publishing it — free guides, how rights work, and what you can actually earn — is collected on Arwy for writers.
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