So I have a story that is 32,431 words. How many words would be a good goal to shoot for my first novel that I hope to publish? I have an app on my phone that keeps track of my word count and what goal I want to reach by what date. I currently have my word count goal set to 40,000. I know this is probably too short but it is a goal I can reach before school gets back in. 1) is 40,000 words a good goal? 2) what is a good word count for my novel? I know that doesn't make sense but I'll make it work... Thanks!
It varies a bit by genre, but generally I'd say you should be looking at somewhere from 70 - 100K. What genre are you writing?
That's a good question! lol. It's part fantasy, part religious fiction. I dunno if you have ever heard of Tedd Dekker but he does a lot of religious fantasy.
Fantasy can often go a bit over 100K because there's a lot of world building. But if you're looking at a sort of spiritual allegory or something, you could go shorter. The Alchemist is short, I think about 45K, and The Little Prince is even shorter, maybe about 20K. Hard to sell to that market if your work isn't truly exceptional, though...
Yeah...I'm hoping it's good enough for both the secular world and the spiritual world though. I doubt it is but I can dream right?
I'd be interested in knowing what that app is! Answering your questions, I'm thinking back to NaNoWriMo that uses fifty thousand words as the target to be written in a month, so I'd suggest aiming for that, just as it's a good starting point to add and remove as necessary. Have you finished the first draft? Perhaps find the word count of books that are similar genre/style to yours and see if you can reach that. I'm sure it helps if you can envision the rough size of the book on the shelf!
I looked up a couple Ted Dekker books (you're right, I'd never heard of him). Black is 432 pages as a paperback, Thr3e is 423. There's no totally reliable way to convert pages to word count, but those are long books. If you're trying to emulate him, I'd suggest you'd need a word count up around 100K.
I hope this helps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_count#In_fiction Don't limit yourself to it though.
That SFWA chart has sort of academic definitions, but they don't really match what I see people publishing. If I bought a 'novel' that was only 40K words long, I'd feel ripped off, especially if it was SF/F, where novels tend to be longer.
