How many pages long in a Word Doc is the average fiction novel?

Well let’s see. When I put the novel I just finished in size 12 Times New Roman, it reaches 95 pages. It’s about 60,000 words, which is pretty average.

A novel technically only has to be 40,000 words – this is the low end, but is what many people aim for when they’re confining themselves to just a month of writing like in NaNoWriMo. My novel is 66 pages at the 40,000 words mark.

Words really are a more reliable measure because number of pages for a given number of words varies wildly, mostly based on how much dialogue you have. Dialogue, being on separate lines, can increase your number of pages by a lot. I would say my novel has a below-average amount of dialogue.

I would say more like 200 pages, but that’s because I think you should double space novels so when people critique them offline, they can write comments in the margins and in the spaces.

I think a novel should be as long as it needs to be to get the story told right and not one page more or less.

Please don’t say “fiction novel.” A novel is fiction by definition.

NaNoWriMo’s goal is 50,000 words, or 1667 per day for 30 days. At 50,000 you can say you’ve “won” NaNoWriMo.

The novels I’ve seen in manuscript were more than 300 pages, running about 300 words per page. That’s 90,000+ for a good-size, solid novel.

My documents are in 12 point double spaced Times New Roman and they average about 270 words per page. So a 50,000 word novel would be about 185 pages and you would need to write just over 6 pages a day for the NaNoWriMo challenge. YMMV of course, as it also depends on your margin sizes.

Let me weigh in as a professional writer with over 10 years of experience writing for NY publishing houses. The “average” length for a fiction novel is 100,000 words. (During Nanawrimo, you’re writing half a novel at 50,000. They call it a novel, but it’s only about half.) Check the writer’s guidelines for the top publishers. Depending upon the font you use, that’s between 333 – 400 pages of double spaced pages. Of course, there are variations. Harlequin 55,000 words and books like Under the Dome by SK that weigh in at 300,000. Keep in mind, there is not a direct correlation from manuscript pages to published pages. The number of published pages depends on the size and spacing typeset by the publisher.