number crunching

I hate math (seems like most of the time, liking math and liking reading and writing are mutually exclusive) but yesterday I voluntarily did some calculations. Nothing you would find in a calculus class - though I did get a 4 on my AP calculus test, by the by, so I'm no slouch - but still.

See, I was trying to guesstimate how long Thistleswitch should be when it's finished. Apparently the normal word count for novels, at least according to Google, is 80,000-120,000 words. I figure a book for young adults, since I think that's my audience, would be 60,000-100,000 or so, which I've just hit the tail end of. But I was trying to see if that was a reasonable number of words, based on other novels that I like to read.

I used Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones and Golden by Cameron Dokey - both excellent books that I recommend to fantasy-lovers. The former is about the length I'm shooting for, while the latter is quite a bit shorter. I wanted to find out about how many words each book consisted of, as well as how many words were in each chapter and how many chapters they had, just so I would know if I was going overboard or not.

I counted the number of words on an average page. I multiplied that by the number of pages, and then subtracted about 1,000 to account for all of the half-pages at the beginning and ending of each chapter. I also multiplied it by the number of pages in the average chapter. So here are the stats.

Howl's Moving Castle
Approximate Word Count: 80,000
Word Count on One Page: 246
Number of Pages: 329
Number of Chapters: 21
Approximate Words Per Chapter: 4,000
Average # of Pages Per Chapter: 16

Golden
Approximate Word Count: 41,000
Word Count on One Page: 234
Number of Pages: 179
Number of Chapters: 19
Approximate Words Per Chapter: 2,000
Average # of Pages Per Chapter: 9

Thistleswitch
Word Count Thus Far: 62,639
Number of Chapters Thus Far: 18
Approximate Words Per Chapter: 3,000

So far, Thistleswitch is fitting right in. Which, for once, is a good thing.

EDIT: Just doing some more recon, and I found this great blog by Chuck Sambuchino that seems to cover pretty much anything about literary agents. He had a post about word counts for different forms of writing, which also seems to demonstrate that I'm right on target.

Perhaps more than any other, YA is the one category where word count is very flexible.

For starters, 55,000 - 69,999 is a great range.

The word round the agent blogosphere is that these books tend to trending longer, saying that you can top in the 80Ks. However, this progression is still in motion and, personally, I'm not sure about this. I would say you're playing with fire the higher you go. When it gets into the 70s, you may be all right—but you have to have a reason for going that high. Again, higher word counts usually mean that the writer does not know how to edit themselves.

A good reason to have a longer YA novel that tops out at the high end of the scale is if it's science fiction or fantasy. Once again, these categories are expected to be a little longer because of the world-building.

Concerning the low end, below 55K could be all right but I wouldn't drop much below about 47K.