How many words is a novella? Check your story’s length

Novella word count: four definitions side by side

Awards need firm lines, so the clearest definitions of story length come from award rules. The two big science fiction and fantasy awards agree on the numbers. Horror’s Bram Stoker Awards fold the two middle lengths into one, and the World Fantasy Award starts its novella category much lower.

These are the Nebula rules for the award year that began on 1 January 2026, the World Science Fiction Society’s constitution as it stood after its 2025 business meeting, the Bram Stoker Awards rules for works published in 2026, and the 2026 World Fantasy Award submission page. Rules change from year to year, so check the current ones before you enter anything.

Novelette vs novella

The novelette is the length most writers have never heard of: longer than a short story, shorter than a novella, and 7,500 to 17,499 words under the Nebula rules. The Hugo Awards use the same lines, but the constitution’s wording, “between 7,500 and 17,500 words” for a novelette and “between 17,500 and 40,000” for a novella, names exactly 17,500 in both, and exactly 40,000 in both novella and novel. The checker flags those two counts as on the line.

The Hugo rules also let the Worldcon committee move a story into a more appropriate category if its length is within 20% of that category’s limits. So a 42,000-word book nominated as a novel could end up on the novella ballot, and the checker tells you when your count is close enough for that. The Horror Writers Association has no novelette at all: everything from 7,500 to 39,999 words is long fiction, and when a count is too close to 40,000 to call, a book published on its own counts as a novel. The World Fantasy Award’s novella category starts at 10,001 words, so a 12,000-word story is a novelette for the Nebulas and Hugos but a novella there.

There is no single industry standard

Outside awards, length is a matter of what a publisher or agent wants, and that varies by genre, by imprint and over time. A few publishers state figures on their own submission pages. As of 5 November 2026:

Each of those is one publisher’s view, not a rule for your genre, and none of them speaks for agents. If an agent or editor you are querying publishes guidelines, theirs beat any chart, this one included.

How this checker counts words

Word processors don’t all count the same way, so the total here can differ slightly from yours. For a submission, use the count from the program you wrote in; this checker shows how the rules apply to a count. Its rules:

• Words are split at spaces, line breaks and dashes. An em dash or en dash between two words, or a typed double hyphen, separates them: “paused—then” is two words.
• Hyphenated words count once: “mother-in-law” is one word.
• Contractions and possessives count once (“don’t”, “Margaret’s”), and so does a number with separators, such as 50,000, 3.5 or 11:40.
• A web or email address counts as one word, as do words joined by a slash (“and/or”).
• Anything without a letter or a digit isn’t a word: a # scene break, * * *, a stray dash.
• Letters in any alphabet count (“café”, “Москва”). Chinese and Japanese, written without spaces, count one word for each character.

Paste the story itself. A title page, contents list or author’s note adds words that no length rule is about.

Worked examples

32,000 words, the example above, is a novella for the Nebulas and Hugos, long fiction for the Bram Stoker Awards and inside World Fantasy’s novella range. It is 8,000 words short of novel length, and because 32,000 is 80% of 40,000, it is within the 20% band in which the Hugo committee could move it to the novel category.

7,400 words is a short story everywhere. It is near enough to 7,500 that two rules may come into play: the Bram Stoker rules treat a count too close to call as long fiction, and the count is within 20% of the Hugo novelette limit.

41,000 words is a novel under all three definitions that have one, though for the Hugos it is still within 20% of the novella limit. For the Bram Stokers, how a work was published only decides the matter when a count is too close to 40,000 to call: then a book on its own is a novel, and a story in an anthology or magazine is long fiction.

Common mistakes

• Counting pages instead of words. William Shunn explains that 250 words a manuscript page was a typewriter-era rule of thumb, and that publishers now use the computer word count.
• Rounding into a category. A 39,600-word manuscript is a novella even if its title page says “about 40,000 words”.
• Assuming “novella” means one thing. As the examples show, the same story can be a novelette for one award and a novella for another.
• Trusting a genre chart over the guidelines in front of you. Publishers’ ranges differ widely, as the table above shows.

The page and time figures in the result are estimates. Manuscript pages come from the old 250-word rule and from a modern layout of 12-point Times New Roman; printed pages use the page count calculator’s model, where you can change every assumption. Reading time uses 260 words a minute, the average silent reading rate for English fiction in a 2019 meta-analysis by Marc Brysbaert, who found most adults read fiction at 200 to 320. Audiobook length uses ACX’s figure that most narrators record about 9,300 words an hour. For reading time for poems and shorter pieces, Shelf Sonnet has tools that go further; to time a talk or a reading aloud, try Ripple Brief.