How many words a day will finish your book?
Put in the book you want and the time you have, and get the words a day that finish it. Or put in the words a day you can hold and see the day you finish. It is the arithmetic the book target in Author Sweets does for you every morning, here for anyone with a draft and a calendar.
Words a day to a date
The sum counts today and the last day, and takes the days a week you say you will write, not the days you hope to. Most writers who finish keep a number they can hit on a bad day and a day or two off; a target that needs every day of the week usually gets missed in the second week and then abandoned. If the words a day are more than you have ever written, give the book more days or fewer words. The arithmetic does not mind.
The day a pace finishes
Five hundred words a day is a page and a half, an hour for most people once the habit sets, and it finishes an 80,000-word novel in 32 weeks at five days a week. A thousand a day halves that to 16 weeks; two hundred a day, every day, still finishes in 57 weeks. The pace you can keep beats the pace you can imagine.
Common plans
| Plan | Words | Time | Days a week | Words a writing day |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Novel in a month | 50,000 | 30 days | 7 | 1,667 |
| First draft in ninety days | 80,000 | 13 weeks | 5 | 1,250 |
| Novella in six weeks | 30,000 | 42 days | 5 | 1,000 |
| A novel in a year | 90,000 | 52 weeks | 4 | 431 |
The month plan is the one every November runs on: fifty thousand words, 1,667 a day with no days off, which is why the writers who finish it usually plan on twenty-five writing days of 2,000 instead. Ninety days at five a week is a working novelist’s first-draft schedule. The year plan is the one that fits around a job and a family, and it still ends with a book.
How long is a book?
Before you set the target, know what you are aiming at. The first four lengths are the ones the science fiction and fantasy writers’ awards have used for decades and most of publishing borrows. The genre ranges are the ones agents quote most often for a first book: what readers of the genre expect, not rules. A first draft can land outside them and be cut or grown in revision.
| Form | Words |
|---|---|
| Short story | up to 7,500 |
| Novelette | 7,500 to 17,500 |
| Novella | 17,500 to 40,000 |
| Novel | from 40,000; most published novels run 70,000 to 100,000 |
| Genre | Typical novel |
|---|---|
| Literary and general fiction | 70,000 to 100,000 |
| Mystery, crime and thriller | 70,000 to 90,000 |
| Romance | 50,000 to 90,000 |
| Science fiction and fantasy | 90,000 to 120,000; epic fantasy runs longer |
| Young adult | 50,000 to 80,000 |
| Middle grade | 30,000 to 55,000 |
| Memoir | 60,000 to 90,000 |
| Nonfiction | 50,000 to 75,000 |
In Author Sweets
The calculator stops at the arithmetic. In the app, Book settings takes the same word target and a finish date (or one of the presets above), and from then on the statistics panel, the library card and the Today line say the words a day that still finish on time, counted from the words you have actually written. After a week they also say which day you will finish at your real pace of the last two weeks, so you learn you are behind while there is time to fix it. The guide to daily goals says how to pick a number that sticks, and the month guide walks through the fastest plan in the table.