[Image: “Doodle with Measuring Tape,” by Bryan Reyna]

I came across an interesting site this morning, called Renaissance Learning (subtitle: “Advanced Technology for Data-Driven Schools.” In general, Renaissance Learning is a resource for (as you might guess) teachers and other educators. One area of the site, the Quiz Store, peddles quizzes about specific books. What interests me today about the site — and may interest others among you who are also writing books — is one particular page at the Quiz Store, the “advanced search” page.

Here’s why this page interests me even though I’m not in the market for a literary quiz: when you do a book or author search, among the information you can easily learn is the number of words in the book.

Traditionally, the answer to the question, How many words should my book be? is It depends on your book’s genre. Then the answerer goes on to spell out, for each genre of interest, a range of word counts — 70-80K words for Genre X, up to 125K words for Y, and so on.

And yes, I know — this all probably sounds like so much foofaraw to those of you who aren’t writing for publication, or are writing to self-publish. You’re thinking: Just write the damn book, right? It takes as many words as it takes, period. Alas, neither the real world of publishing nor the minds of most writers work that way.

The problem with these guidelines, it seems to me, is two-fold: (a) they’re only rough guides (the recommendations always say things like, “Of course, there are plenty of exceptions!”); and (b) they presuppose that your definition of your own book’s genre will match the definition of the genre as used by whoever’s supplied the word counts in the first place. A more common-sensical approach, I think, is just to come up with a list of books and/or authors you like, vaguely “like” your book (and/or you) in terms of desired readership, career aspirations, and so on. How many words were in those books, as published?

The Renaissance Learning site doesn’t include statistics for every author, let alone book, ever published. But I think it includes enough to be instructive to curious writers (and readers!).
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