For various reasons, I’m changing my current book (Almost Super) from a YA novel to a middle grade novel. This entails dropping the characters’ age, as well as the number of pages. It got me thinking…
There are certain guidelines when it comes to how long novels are supposed to be. Middle grade is traditionally 20k – 40k words. YA can be up to 80k. Epic fantasy is around 120k-130k.
Why the word count? Is that how many words kid can read before they get bored? Or is it too daunting to pick up a really thick book? With e-books, you don’t have that problem. A book might be 50 pages, or 500, it’s going to look roughly the same when you download it.
It makes me wonder if e-books might bring back the short story or novella. It’s hard to make a return on a printed 20 page short story, but I’ll be willing to bet people would pay 99 cents for a digital copy of a really good short story.
So all you authors out there, dust off your files, and poke around. Do you have a killer short story? Or have you had an idea for one, but didn’t think it would be worth fleshing it out? Maybe it’s time to think again.
