No! Not that kind of length—get your mind out of the gutter!
I’m talking about book length. One of my publishers (Evernight) has a novelette line called Romance on the Go, and I’ve noticed that a lot of readers are confused about length and word count.
There are a bunch of different opinions on how long a novel should be, as well as a short story or novella, but generally speaking, here is a short cheat sheet you can use so you know what you’re getting:
- Short Short Story = up to 7,500 words
- Short Story/Novelette (Romance on the Go titles) = 8,000 to 12,000 words
- Novella = 20,000 to 40,000 or 50,000 words
- Novel = 40,000 or 50,000 words and up
- Epic OMG this is going to take forever to read = 100,000 words and up
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For some comparison shopping, here is some more info:
Little Dove is 10,850 words
Kiss Is A Four-Letter word is 40,600 words
Appassionato is 64,657 words
Something Shifty is 40,680 words (releases Thursday!)
