Story Length

In manuscript pages? This was a discussion in my English class and now I'm curious; when publishing, how many pages is a typical novel, novella, short story, etc.? All I know is that the typical limit for a YA novel is like 250 pages in manuscript form.

Does anyone know where I can find this info, if you don't know yourself? My teacher couldn't find anything (so she came up with a ridiculous cluster of ranges) and I haven't had any luck either.

I think most industry people go by word count instead of page number, so I doubt you're going to find much.

yeah, page number changes based on format and format changes based on the publisher's preference, so word count is industry standard. If you want to use Wikipedia's chart:


Novel

over 40,000 words

Novella

17,500 to 40,000 words

Novelette

7,500 to 17,500 words

Short story

under 7,500 words

But that varies from publisher to publisher based on their guidelines

As they mentioned, the industry is more concerned with final word count than pages. If you want to estimate how many pages/how long something is you could use the old pre-computer method of judging length, which is 250 words to every properly formatted page.

Properly formatted means double spaces, margins set at one inch all round, size 12 font in either courier or TNR with exactly 25 lines per full page. Every page, even the half ones, count at 250 words. It's not an exact science but it gave editors a reasonable estimate in the days before word counters.

Combine that with publisher standards and you should be able to get a rough estimate of how many manuscript pages a given book length will be.

My Sherlock Holmes mystery novel is being published at just over 50,000 words, which is about 200-205 pages. The publishing extras from my particular publisher are adding about 20 pages beyond that.

Before I met my publisher, I read an agent's list of expected wordcounts, and as a result, I was scared I would never be able to get published at this length; turns out it wasn't true. I've come to believe that certain word/page counts may be expected but are not ironclad.

I believe, based on the industry standard, that typical YA right now runs between 55,000 - 75,000 words. Not all, obviously. This is a range, an average, and not an absolute. But I think that this is what is typical.

This is an interesting article that you may find helpful.
http://literaticat.blogspot.com/2011/05/wordcount-dracula.html