Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Short Story vs Novella

You're probably thinking there's not going to be much to this post.  I've already talked about the upper limits of a short story - 30,000 words - and you're thinking that a novella should be longer than that.  You'd be right.  A novella is usually between 30,000 and 60,000 words but, for my tastes, I would say that the novella cut off should be around 40,000.  That's due to doing NaNoWriMo for many years where your word count for winning is 50,000 for a novel and, for romance novels, the bare minimum is 40,000 words.  So, for me, your short story should be anywhere under 30,000 but your novella should be under 40,000 or 50,000.

Now, these are not hard and fast rules.  If you want hard and fast rules, Wikipedia says that a novella is anything from 17,500 words to 40,000 words.  What I've said above is more my own tastes and knowing a bit of what publishers typically want to see in your word counts for a novel.  For you and what you're defining your work as, you're going to want to check with who you're publishing with and see their guidelines.  They're usually going to have the hard and fast rule in black and white so you know you won't get automatically be tossed into the reject file by word count alone.

If you'd like more information on novel lengths, I recommend LitRejection's blog post on word counts.  At the bottom, it gives what they recommend for novellas, short stories, and flash fiction along with some words of wisdom.

That's going to do it for this time and, until tomorrow, keep on writing!

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