<p>Someone asked me on Twitter the other day, 'What do you/your publishers like to have as an ideal target wordcount?' Good question -- let me try to answer it.</p>
<p>As I may have said around here before, on this side of the Atlantic we measure books in terms of words. In America people doggedly use 'pages'. I have no idea how they do that given that people write in different fonts and line spacing and things these days.</p>
<p>Pages go back to the idea we wrote on typewriters, with a monospaced font and double line spacing. Some software (maybe even Scrivener) can try to make a guesstimate of that from a computer document. Don't care. Don't like pages. I come from newspapers where we always worked in word counts, as do most European publishers, so let's stick with that one.</p>
<!--more--><p>My own books tend to come in at between 110,000 and 120,000 words these days. That is somewhat shorter than some of my earlier work -- Epiphany was close to 160,000 words if I recall correctly. But books were bigger in the Nineties, and those ones could have used some judicious editing too. Now I am content to be wrapped up by 120,000 words or so. I'm probably coming in a touch longer than most of my peers, but my books may be a bit more complex than theirs anyway. I'd guess -- and I stand to be corrected here -- the average book length for popular fiction is around the 100,000 word mark in the UK.</p>
<p>Budding writers often ask this question out of self-interest. They've written something that's come out at 60,000 words or so and they're wondering whether anyone will publish it. Probably not over here is the honest answer (though there are always exceptions). In the US things are different. I remember having a conversation on this subject with a US publisher who said they would produce certain kinds of book -- often things like romantic or light mystery -- at 60,000 words or so. Which goes to show that the US and UK publishing industries do differ in some respects, quite markedly.</p>
<p>If you're a British writer and hoping you can swing that over here then I wish you luck. You'll need it. Nor are you likely to get very far with a 'novella', which can be as little as 40,000 words or less, since these are generally the territory of established writers too.</p>
<p>So my advice is simple -- go for 100,000 words because some people will think that anything shorter than that is going to be insufficient. And unless you are brimming over with confidence, don't even think about delivering some Stephen King-style doorstopper of a quarter a million words or so. Again, you can try tricks like that once you're published (if you want). But it's not a great opening move for a debut author.</p>