How Many Words Is a Novella?

A novella is the form most writers arrive at by accident. You set out to write a novel, the story turns out to be smaller than you planned, and you end up with 30,000 words and the uneasy feeling that you've produced something incomplete.

You haven't. You've produced a novella, which is a form with its own thresholds, its own structure, and — for the first time in a century — its own market. This guide gives you the numbers, the boundaries on either side, and the test for whether your story wants to be one.

The short answer

A novella is 17,500 to 40,000 words. Below that you're in novelette and short story territory; at 40,000 you've crossed into novel.

If you want the middle of the form rather than its edges, aim at 30,000 words. That's a book a reader finishes in one long evening, and it's the length most novellas published today land near.

The full ladder

Prose fiction is categorized by length, and the categories are more precise than most writers realize.

These thresholds come from awards and industry categories rather than from any law of literature — they're the lines used to decide which prize a work competes for and how a publisher's catalog is organized. That makes them conventions, not rules. But they're the conventions your reader, your retailer, and your reviewer are all using, which makes arguing with them expensive.

One of these words causes trouble. Novelette is a real category that almost nobody uses in conversation — if your book is 12,000 words, most people will call it a long short story and move on. Use it when an award's entry form asks for it, and not otherwise.

How many chapters is a novella?

Most novellas run 10 to 20 chapters, and the arithmetic is the same as for any book: total word count divided by chapter length.

Novellas tend toward the shorter chapters in that table, and for a reason worth understanding: the form's whole advantage is momentum. A reader who picks up a novella usually intends to finish it, and short chapters keep that intention alive. Our guide on how many chapters a novel should have covers the three chapter lengths in detail.

How many pages is a novella?

About 65 to 160 printed pages, at the 250 to 275 words a paperback page holds — so roughly 110 to 120 pages for a typical 30,000-word novella.

That thinness is the form's one real commercial problem in print: a spine that narrow is hard to find on a shelf, and print-on-demand economics work against very short books. See how many pages is a novel for the full conversion and what page count costs.

What actually makes a novella different

Length is the definition, but it isn't the craft. A novella is not a novel with chapters removed; it's a structurally different object, and four things separate them.

One plot line. A novel can carry a main plot and two or three subplots. A novella carries one, possibly with a single thread beneath it. Every subplot you add costs 8,000 words you don't have.

One or two viewpoints. Each additional viewpoint character needs an introduction, an arc, and a payoff — 10,000 to 15,000 words of overhead in a book that only has 30,000 to spend.

A compressed time frame. Novels roam across years. Novellas usually cover days or weeks, because a long span demands transitions, and transitions are the first thing the length forces you to cut.

A single turn. A novel escalates through several reversals. A novella typically has one central turn placed near the middle, and everything before it sets it up while everything after it pays it off.

If you're building the plan for one, that's the shape to build toward: our guide on how many words are in a novel explains how to work backward from a target length to a scene count, and the method is identical at novella scale — you just have far fewer scenes to spend.

Why the form came back

For most of the twentieth century, the novella was commercially awkward. It was too long for magazines and too short to justify a printed volume, so it survived mostly inside collections.

Digital publishing removed that constraint. A file has no printing cost tied to its thickness, so a 30,000-word book can be sold on its own at a price that matches its length. Three things follow from that:

• Series work. Readers who finish a novella in one sitting come back for the next one sooner than they would for a 400-page novel.
• Reading time became a selling point. "One evening" is a promise a novella can make and a novel can't.
• A first book got smaller. Finishing a 30,000-word book teaches you more about structure than abandoning a 90,000-word one, and you can only learn to finish by finishing.

Novella or short novel?

The line is 40,000 words, and it's worth taking seriously in one direction only.

Calling a 45,000-word book a novella costs you nothing. Calling a 30,000-word book a novel costs you reviews — readers who paid novel prices notice, say so publicly, and the reviews outlast the decision.

So when you're close to the line, the honest label is the cheaper one. And if you'd rather clear it than argue about it, 50,000 words is unambiguous: a short novel, past any threshold, and still a book you can finish.

How long does it take to write one?

At 1,000 words a day with a realistic allowance for missed days, a 30,000-word draft takes about six weeks. Drafting is roughly a third of the total work, so plan on three to four months for a finished novella, revision included.

That's the strongest practical argument for the form. It's a complete book, with a real structure and a real ending, inside a timeline you can actually see the end of — and how long it takes to write a novel shows what the same commitment looks like at full length.

Frequently asked questions

Is 30,000 words a novella? Yes, and it's close to the middle of the form. It's the length most novellas published today land near, and a comfortable target if you're writing one deliberately.

Is 50,000 words a novella? No. 50,000 clears the 40,000-word line, so it's a novel — a short one. The famous 50,000-word November challenge therefore produces a short novel rather than a novella, which surprises a lot of the writers who complete it.

How many chapters should a novella have? Ten to twenty, most often twelve to sixteen at 2,000-word chapters. Lean shorter rather than longer; the form runs on momentum.

What's the difference between a novella and a novelette? Word count only. A novelette is 7,500 to 17,500 words, a novella 17,500 to 40,000. In practice almost nobody outside awards juries uses the word novelette.

Can you publish a novella? Yes, and digitally it's straightforward — the file costs the same to distribute whatever its length. In print it's harder: very short books have thin spines and unfavorable print-on-demand economics. Many novellas are published as ebooks first and collected in print later.

Should my first book be a novella? It's a reasonable choice, for one reason above all others: you'll finish it. A finished 30,000-word book teaches you structure, revision, and publishing end to end; an abandoned 90,000-word one teaches you none of the three.

Is a novella easier to write than a novel? Shorter, not easier. A novella has less room to hide a weak scene, and the single turn has to land — there's no second reversal to rescue it. What it is, reliably, is faster.

Writing a novella

The hardest part of a novella is holding the line. Thirty thousand words is enough for one story told properly and not enough for the second subplot that will occur to you around the halfway mark — and by the time you notice you've taken it, you're writing a bad novel instead of a good novella.

That's the discipline Make Your Novel is built around. You pick a genre and a length up front — Novella (~30,000) is one of the four settings — and the Storyteller proposes three premises to pick from, then builds a story bible, a structure, and a chapter-by-chapter outline sized for the length you chose. Every chapter in that outline carries its own word target, and each one is written against it inside a fixed floor and ceiling, which is exactly the constraint a novella needs: no chapter gets to quietly become two. You get the finished manuscript as DOCX, EPUB, PDF, Markdown, or HTML.

One thing worth knowing before you start a novel: until you've paid for anything, length is capped at 50,000 words — which means a novella fits entirely inside the free trial, from premise to export, with room to spare. If you want to see what the whole process produces before deciding anything, a novella is the cheapest complete test there is.

In short

• A novella is 17,500 to 40,000 words; aim at 30,000 for the middle of the form.
• That's 10 to 20 chapters and roughly 110 to 120 printed pages.
• Structurally: one plot line, one or two viewpoints, a compressed time frame, one central turn.
• The 40,000-word line matters in one direction — never market a novella as a novel.
• Expect about six weeks to draft and three to four months to finish.