fic length vs book length: a (hopefully) helpful comparison
Because my new novel, An Accident of Stars, is due out in the States tomorrow - UK and Australian releases to follow shortly - and in honour of the fact that there are so many amazing fanfic authors out there who, in addition to gracing us with wonderful fics, are working on original stories, I wanted to give you a breakdown of wordcount in publishing vs fanfic. Thanks to endless fanfic binges, I now have an extraordinarily accurate knowledge of how long it’ll take me to read 20k or 50k, but that knowledge is less helpful when it comes to traditionally published works, as you don’t really have a good sense of the wordcount. Which is, I think, intimidating for a lot of people who’ve acclimated to fic-as-default, not only in terms of approaching a book - it can be jarring to simply not know how long it'll take to read when you’re used to being able to plan that out - but also when it comes to your own original writing.
First, some basic info on publishable length: if you’re writing YA or romance, your default length is going to be somewhere between 55k and 90k; a regular work of fiction is probably between 80k and 100k, and if you’re writing in SFF, the high end potentially stretches out waaay beyond that - Patrick Rothfuss’s second book, The Wise Man’s Fear, is 400k, while the most recent instalment in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire Series, A Dance With Dragons, is 422k. Granted, those are both exceptionally long works, contributing to existing series, written by prominent, popular authors - meaning, they’re more exception than rule - but generally speaking, the point is that SFF works tend to be a bit longer.
An Accident of Stars, which is the first book in a series, is 134k. Here’s what that looks like in terms of paperback thickness:
That 134k is broken down into 24 chapters - I'm somewhere in the middle re default chapter length, being shorter than some and longer than others - which are split across four sections. Here’s what the sections look like when you hold the book open at those points:
Part 1 is roughly 32k. Part 2 is 38k. Part 3, the longest, is 48k, and Part 4, the shortest, is 13k. (Those numbers are rounded down rather than up.) The rest is acknowledgements, glossaries and other details.
In fanfic, 20k is something of a golden length - long enough to get invested, not so long that you’re in danger of staying up until 3am. (Unless it’s already 3am. Which it often is, I won’t lie. YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.) So if you’re trying to translate a good 20k fic to publishing length, it’s potentially a quarter to a fifth of an entire 80k-100k novel, or a third of a YA book, which is pretty awesome!
In conclusion, fanfic writers are unicorns and should come rub their queer, diverse, subversive little hands all over every other genre, and I hope this is helpful to anyone who’s been worrying about word length. Moar good books = NOM.
[Pictured above: the author being a dork.]
