Jennifer Dunne
1 min readJun 19, 2021

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There is also "novelette" which shares space with novella. It's around 7,000 - 17,000, or 10,000 - 20,000, depending on who you listen to.

And many publishers have a set number of pages that the book must be, because they have all the costs optimized for that. So, for example, a publisher might demand that all books they publish in a certain line are 210 pages. That would comfortably fit anything from 85 - 95k. They would take anywhere from 75 - 100, but it would have to be extraordinary, because the print would either be a huge font with giant margins, or a teensy font with slivers of margins, and they would expect some negative reader feedback because of that. When I was writing romance about 10 years ago, my target was 90k, but I wrote paranormal romance, and that tended to run longer than contemporary, which was around 70k. Lengths do change, though. When I started, you could get away with 50k in a Regency romance, and the "thick" romances were 80k. The price of paper rose dramatically and I think that resulted in publishers wanting shorter books again.

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Jennifer Dunne
Jennifer Dunne

Written by Jennifer Dunne

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