Common novel lengths
| Word count | Roughly the length of | Manuscript pages | Printed book pages | Reading time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | A piece of flash fiction | 4 | 2 to 4 | 4 min |
| 5,000 | A short story | 20 | 14 to 20 | 20 min |
| 10,000 | A novelette | 40 | 28 to 40 | 40 min |
| 25,000 | The Old Man and the Sea | 100 | 71 to 100 | 1 hr 40 min |
| 50,000 | The Great Gatsby | 200 | 142 to 200 | 3 hr 20 min |
| 60,000 | Brave New World | 240 | 171 to 240 | 4 hr |
| 70,000 | The Catcher in the Rye | 280 | 200 to 280 | 4 hr 40 min |
| 80,000 | Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone | 320 | 228 to 320 | 5 hr 20 min |
| 90,000 | The Hobbit | 360 | 257 to 360 | 6 hr |
| 100,000 | The Hunger Games | 400 | 285 to 400 | 6 hr 40 min |
| 120,000 | Pride and Prejudice | 480 | 342 to 480 | 8 hr |
| 150,000 | Watership Down | 600 | 428 to 600 | 10 hr |
| 200,000 | Moby-Dick | 800 | 571 to 800 | 13 hr 20 min |
Published word counts vary by edition and by how the counting is done, so treat the comparisons as close approximations rather than exact matches.
Where 250 words a page comes from
Standard manuscript format is a set of conventions publishing settled on long before anyone submitted by email: 12 point Courier or Times New Roman, double-spaced, one inch margins on all four sides, first line of each paragraph indented half an inch.
Set a page that way and it holds roughly 250 words. Courier is a monospaced font, so it lands almost exactly there. Times New Roman is narrower and often runs closer to 300. The industry kept 250 anyway, because the point was never precision. The point was that an editor could pick up any manuscript, glance at the stack, and know roughly what they were holding.
Why anyone still cares. Nobody prints submissions any more, so the page count is mostly a habit. What survived is the estimate: when a writer says "a 320 page novel", everyone in publishing hears 80,000 words. The conversion is a shared shorthand, not a formatting requirement.
Manuscript pages and book pages are different numbers
A double-spaced manuscript page holds about 250 words. A typeset page in a finished book holds 250 to 350, because it is single-spaced, set in a smaller measure, and printed on a smaller sheet than US Letter.
So the same 80,000 word novel is a 320 page manuscript and roughly a 230 to 320 page book. Neither number is wrong. They are measuring different objects.
The printed range is wide for good reasons. A mass market paperback with small type and tight leading fits far more on a page than a large print hardcover. Trim size, font, leading, and how generous the designer is with chapter openings all move the number. If you need an exact page count for a finished book, only your typesetter can give you one.
Which number to give an agent
Give them a word count. Almost every agent guideline and submission form asks for words, not pages, and for a practical reason: a word count is the same number on every machine that opens the file, and a page count is not.
Round to the nearest thousand when you quote it. A query letter that says 80,000 words reads as a professional who knows the conventions. One that says 79,847 words reads as someone who has not finished revising, because the specificity is doing no work.
If a guideline does ask for pages, they mean manuscript pages in standard format. Use the 250 word figure and give a round number.