Novel, Novella, or Short Story? Some Tips About Terminology

As an editor, I often see job postings by beginning writers looking for someone to edit a piece of writing that they call their "book" or "novel." Frequently, these postings mention a word count that is somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 words. It's great that these writers have had the perseverance to put that many words on paper and that they want to have their work professionally edited before they send it out into the world. Writing is hard, and these new writers have done an important thing by finishing their piece of writing, however they choose to label it.

However, a book of the length many of these new writers have created technically isn't considered a novel or even a book in the publishing industry, which has its own set of terms for different kinds of writing. Some of these terms have to do with the length of the piece of writing, while others describe the audience for or content of the book, article, or story. Understanding the technical meanings of terms like "genre," "novel," and "novella" can be important for writers who want to publish, market, and distribute their work, especially if they intend to go through the traditional process of finding an agent and a publisher. Let's take a look at some of these terms and how they are used.

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What Is Genre?

"Genre" is a catchall term that categorizes a piece of writing by its content, length, and intended audience. Three of the most common genres of writing are fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, although there are other genres as well. Each of these categories can be further refined to tell us more about what kind of writing it is and for which audience it is intended.

Audience

Publishers usually classify books and other publications by the age of the readers for whom the story, magazine, book, or other type of writing is intended. Here are the most common audience labels:

• juvenile (up to 12 years old)

• young adult (12–18 years old)

• new adult (18–29 years old)

• adult (over 18 years old)

  
  

These labels can apply equally to both fiction and nonfiction. For writers, knowing which audience you're aiming for is important, since the way you might write for little kids or teens will be different from the style you might use if you're aiming for an older adult audience.

It's also important to note that there can be a bit of crossover between the intended audience and who actually reads the book. A lot of adults like to read young adult fiction, for example, and some young adults also read new adult or adult fiction.

Fiction

Fiction genres tell us something about the kind of story being told. Below are some examples of common fiction genres:

• science fiction

• romance

• fantasy

• mystery

• horror

• thriller/suspense

• literary fiction

• historical fiction

  
  

Each fiction genre has its own conventions. These conventions include character arcs, pacing, the types of plot points used to move the story forward, and the overall structure of the story. For example, if the story is a romance, it will be about two people entering into some kind of love and/or sexual relationship with each other, and about the trials and tribulations they face as they try to make that relationship work. The plot points will have to do with the stages of the relationship, while character arcs will move the characters from being single to being a couple. A mystery, by contrast, will have plot points that reveal the different stages of the mystery, from the discovery of the body to the uncovering of evidence to the final "whodunnit" reveal at the end. Character development is usually less important in a mystery than it is in a more character-driven genre such as romance or literary fiction.

Sometimes, genres can be combined. For example, romance novels, mysteries, and horror stories can also be historical fiction, wherein the author sets the story at some point in the past. There are some mysteries that also qualify as literary fiction because of the style and quality of the writing, for example the mystery novels of P. D. James.

Nonfiction

Nonfiction is usually classified by subject and by the audience for which the piece of writing is intended. If a piece of nonfiction is intended for adults, it may be for a general audience, meaning that any interested person will likely be able to understand it, or it may be geared toward a professional or specialist audience, such that readers will need to have a certain amount of technical knowledge before they can understand some or all of that piece of writing.

Here are some examples of nonfiction subjects:

• biography/autobiography

• memoir

• history

• true crime

• science

• popular culture

• current events

• humor

  
  

Medium

The medium for which the writing is intended is another important aspect of genre. Here are some media in common use today for different kinds of writing:

• books

• articles

• blog posts

• screenplays/teleplays

• graphic novels/comic books

• chapbooks

  
  

Books and articles are usually prose works that will be published electronically, in print, or both, while blog posts are always electronic. A chapbook contains poetry, and may be in print or electronic or both. Screenplays and teleplays are the scripts used to create films and TV shows, while graphic novels and comic books tell stories using a combination of text and pictures drawn by an artist who specializes in that style of art.

Putting It All Together

When we put this all together, we can see that a particular piece of writing usually has multiple generic markers. ("Generic" in this context is the adjectival form of "genre.") For example, a piece of writing might be a historical mystery that is also a screenplay for a film aimed at an adult audience, or it might be a juvenile nonfiction book about dinosaurs, or it might be a young adult action adventure story that is a graphic novel about heroes who hunt monsters.

All About Word Count

As mentioned above, the length of a piece of writing has a bearing on the generic designation given to that piece of writing. For example, "book," "article," "novel," and "short story" are all terms that to one degree or another depend on word count for their definition.

Nonfiction Books and Articles

In traditional publishing, book-length nonfiction usually has at least 50,000 words, and may have 75,000 or more. For example, nonfiction books published by university presses often are 90,000 words or more, while books published by trade publishers might be closer to that 75k word count. Self-published nonfiction manuscripts often are less than 50,000 words.

The number of words in an article will depend on where the article is to be published. Articles may be published in popular magazines, on the web as blog posts, or in scholarly publications. Blog posts usually have between 500 and 2,500 words. The length of a scholarly article will depend on the discipline. Many scholarly articles in the sciences are only a few pages and a few thousand words long, while articles in the social sciences or humanities can run to fifty or even a hundred pages and tens of thousands of words.

Novels

In the publishing industry, a novel is usually a single work of fiction that contains a minimum of 50,000 words, although for many publishers even 60,000 words would still be considered too short to be considered a novel. Most novels published today have around 80,000–90,000 words, although some might be a little shorter and others might be a bit longer. Some novels can have 120,000 words or more, but novels with more than 100,000 words are relatively rare and usually have been written by established authors.

To a certain degree, the word count for a novel is also going to depend on the audience for which it is intended. Young adult novels, for example, may be a bit shorter than novels intended for an adult audience, but this is not a hard-and-fast rule because in practice there often is no great difference in word count between young adult and adult novels. Novels aimed at younger kids, however, are more likely to be shorter than novels aimed at older teens or adults.

Genre can also affect word count. Romance novels and mysteries, for example, are likely to have a somewhat lower word count than epic fantasy, for example.

Novellas and Novelettes

A novella is somewhat shorter than a novel. Some people define a novella as having between 10,000 and 40,000 words, while others say that a novella's word count should be between 17,500 and 40,000 words. Still others say that a novella is between 20,000 and 50,000 words.

Like a novel, a novella is a work of fiction that tells a single story. Novellas sometimes get published as freestanding works. For example, George Orwell's Animal Farm is a novella weighing in at just shy of 30,000 words. Novellas may also get published in a collection of multiple stories that together make up a novel-length work. Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror by James Hynes is an example of this, since it contains three novellas in a single novel-length volume.

Novelettes are also freestanding works of fiction. They are shorter than novellas, but longer than short stories.

Short Stories

Short stories are works of fiction that usually have less than 15,000 words. However, it's rare today for short stories to have more than 5,000–7,500 words. Flash fiction is a short story of less than 1,000 words.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, authors often published their short stories in general-interest magazines that had content about everything from recipes to fashion to parenting advice to songs complete with musical notation, in addition to stories and poetry. Many of Edgar Allen Poe's writings were initially published in these kinds of magazines. Magazines like The New Yorker still publish short fiction today.

Literary journals collect short stories from different authors and publish sets of these stories together in each issue of the journal, while traditional publishers sometimes will publish collections of short stories by a single author or anthologies of stories by multiple authors. Today's self-publishing options allow authors to publish and sell individual short stories or short story collections on platforms such as Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing or Barnes & Noble's Nook.

Why Does This Matter?

Knowing the genre of your manuscript is important because reader expectations and marketability are two intertwined things that can determine whether readers will be likely to read what you wrote.

Someone who is in the market for a novel, for example, is going to be expecting a story of a certain length, something that's not too long but also something more extended than a short story or novella. Someone who wants to read adult fiction might not be interested in writing for young adults. A book that is marketed as an adult literary fiction novel but really is a young adult fantasy novelette is not going to sell well, because the length of the item, the genre, and the intended audience all have been mislabeled.

Reader expectations with regard to genre are also important. For example, if a book that is marketed as a mystery or a thriller doesn't hit its plot points correctly with a certain type of pacing and a certain alternation between calmer scenes and action set pieces, readers are unlikely to enjoy the book and won't finish reading it, or they might finish reading it and then give it a bad review, which might limit the audience for the book even further.

Literary agents and publishers are very savvy about reader expectations and marketability. They know that readers might not be interested in novels that are overly long or overly short, and lack of reader interest means lack of sales. They also know that a fiction book that doesn't hit its expected marks in terms of the conventions of the genre will be unlikely to sell unless there's something unusually gripping about the writing, and that sort of book is extremely rare. Readers know what they like, and they buy the kinds of things they know they like, and publishers work within those parameters as much as they possibly can.

Many writers choose to avoid the traditional publishing route by self-publishing, which means that they have a bit more leeway in terms of how closely they hew to things like word count or the conventions of the genre they're writing in. However, having a good grasp of the way that genre works can help self-publishing authors as well, since they will be able to create a better-constructed piece of writing and market it with the correct labels, all of which will help them align their work with reader expectations and thus potentially boost sales.

Whether you have written a blog post, a nonfiction book, or the next award-winning novel, Quaternion Editorial can help you polish your writing and get it publication-ready. I look forward to working with you!

Photo by Tom Hermans via Unsplash