“What are you writing?”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“I mean, what are you writing? An article? A novel? A short story or something in-between or beyond?”

Besides novels and short stories, other kinds of writing, basically categorized by their length, include novellas, novelettes, and short, short stories, and, of course, there are publishers and agents who are interested in them.

Novels: Novels can vary from 50,000 words to several hundred thousand words, or even more depending on the genre, such as science fiction or fantasy. These novels run from 80,000 to 100,000 words and often reach 20,000 words beyond that.

Novellas: At least one guide calls a 50,000-word novel a novella or a short novel. Another guide says a novella can run anywhere from 17,500 to 40,000 words. That’s quite a difference in word count. Around a year and a half ago, one of the larger publishers of science fiction and fantasy novels opened submissions for unsolicited novellas ranging from 20,000 to 40,000 words. After contacting them, I was told that they would accept novellas up to 45,000 words, but that was the absolute limit. I submitted what I had intended as a science fiction novel that ran to about 43,500 words. Ultimately, this so-called novella of mine was rejected. Several months later, I had lengthened it to 50,000 words+ and presented it to an agent as a young adult novel. The agent rejected it as well, but she did inform me that young adult novels usually started at 75,000 words.

Novelettes: According to one guide, novelettes are 20,000 to 25,000 words long while another defines them as anywhere from 7,500 to 17,500 words in length, a 10,000-word span. A few years ago, I published a middle grade fantasy story that I thought of as a novelette. At somewhat over 13,000 words, it was firmly placed in the second guide’s category, but fell short in the first one.

Short Stories: When I first started writing seriously, some time during the third grade, I wanted to write novels. It wasn’t until graduate school that I learned the value of writing short stories. In some ways, they can be more difficult to write than longer pieces of writing. They require intense focus and constraint. What is more difficult? Writing too much and having to cut or not being able to write enough? I prefer the former dilemma. As an ongoing assignment in a creative writing class, I began writing a series of connected short stories, ranging from 2,500 to 7,500 words. Still figuring I wanted to turn them into several novels, I was encouraged to do so by the teacher and several classmates. I concluded that they were better as short stories, and that it was fine to write more episodes if I were inspired to do so. I eventually published several collections of them.

Short Short Stories: One guide mentions a limit of 2,000 words for short short stories while the other remains silent. As a member of a now defunct writers’ group, I accepted the challenge to write short short stories several times a month from a one-word prompt and with a limit of 500 words. I got pretty good at writing these short short stories, but perhaps more importantly, I had fun writing them. They forced me to streamline my writing while allowing me to explore beyond the bounds of science fiction and fantasy and into literary fiction and memoir. I eventually published several collections of these short short stories. 

You have already been reading between the lines and have realized that, at best, these are rough slide-ruler guides as to what publishers want and what agents are looking for, so always carefully read submission guidelines. If you manage to catch the eye of an agent, you can expect more guidance as to what length of work she or he is looking for and what she or he will be able to pitch to publishers. Good luck!