Average Book Length

So I was discussing with my brother-in-law the average length of a book.  I had also discussed this with a friend of mine recently and she told me she thought it to be about 80k words.  I could have sworn that I had read a few authors blogs where their books were totaling way over the 100k mark so thought that this estimate seemed to be a little too modest.  Because of this I have been aiming at 125k words (as stated in my previous post on goals).  However, as I said, I was discussing this with my sister's husband on facebook last night and he also said that he had heard from a fairly reputable source that 80,000 words was a good average length.  So, after hearing this twice from two different sources, I decided it would probably be a good idea to do some research for myself.

What I found is that for a first time novel, publishers are much more likely to take a chance on a 60k-90k book than on a 150k epic (closer to Harry Potter size then average novel).  This confused me because I had also heard that a page of written text in Microsoft roughly translated to a written book page.  So I was picturing needing to write 250 or so pages in Word in order to have enough for a book (which given I'm averaging approx 675 words/page would make it about l69k words).  This is not true.  I found one website that listed the average number of words on a regularly sized paperback is around 250.  This varies according to margin sizes, type, spacing, etc...   So I went and picked up two random books from my bookshelf.  One was a paperback, one a hardback, opened to a random page and counted the words.  The paperback had 243 and the hardback 267.  So I would say that the 250 words/page estimate seems to hold true.

So this means that right now my manuscript is on page 24 on Microsoft Word.  However I have 14,136 words, which would be 56.5 pages in an average paperback.  So where I was worried that my first chapter of seven pages was far too short, it would actually be 17 paperback pages.  I don't know about you but this makes me feel much better.  Instead of worrying that I won't have enough story to be able to fill as many pages as I need I now worry about making it more concise and to the point.  Also, I don't need to write a page and a half every day to finish by Christmas.  But, if I continued doing that I would finish by the end of November.  That's right, it cuts three weeks off of my writing estimate.  So I think this is reason to celebrate.  Who's with me? :)

-Kiera
24 pages
14,136 words and counting.