[Laer Carroll]

An article in the Wall Street Journal said that YA novels are expected by agents to be in the 40K to 60K word size.

This seems to be a lot smaller than what I see on the bookstore shelves.

Any references to YA size that you believe true?

[PeteMC]

I don't have any references to hand but I had a quick look on Amazon at some of the YA stuff my niece used to like when she was younger and it look looks like 50-60k is probably more the range, using the old guestimate of 250 words a page (although I suppose it may be less than that, given that the typeface tends to be bigger in YA books).

[JimF]

I don't know how hard and fast those rules would be. Every Harry Potter book is quite a good deal longer than the 60K/250Pg mark.

[KatG]

Seriously, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are kind of useless for these things. The New York Times went around saying that the average book advance was $30,000, which is ridiculously high.

There are middle school books (9-12) and YA/teen books (12+) and media like the Journal tend to mash them together as one, but they're a bit different. Middle school books do tend to be short because kids in that age group on average are not necessarily accomplished readers. So a middle school book might be anywhere between 30,000-90,000 words long, on average, though some are larger and some illustrated works are somewhat shorter.

YA has a wider gamut, about 50,000-100,000 words on average, but a number of books go over that, especially if they are fantasy. If you're writing a comedy or a coming-of-age sort of tale, the books are usually on the lower end of the scale. If you're writing SF or fantasy, they are likely to be thicker. The world-building takes up extra room.

Kenneth Oppel's YA novel Airborn was about 100,000 words. Cassandra Clare's YA Clockwork Angel was about 130,000 words. Scott Westerfeld's YA Leviathan was about 77,000 words. Diana Wynne Jones' middle school novel Game is only 33,000 words. And so on and so forth.

[PeteMC]

Seriously, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are kind of useless for these things. The New York Times went around saying that the average book advance was $30,000, which is ridiculously high.


To be fair, it's probably more of an issue with them using the ever-misleading average than anything else - it only takes a couple of Rowling / King / Grisham style megabucks advances in the calculation to skew the figures I would have thought.

[KatG]

To be fair, it's probably more of an issue with them using the ever-misleading average than anything else - it only takes a couple of Rowling / King / Grisham style megabucks advances in the calculation to skew the figures I would have thought.

Oh no, it wasn't that. It was what the publishers told them. They were padding. They do the same thing with the "average" salaries of lower rung employees. And why publishers inflate the size of their actual print runs to build enthusiasm from booksellers and release the number of copies printed to the press (which is irrelevant to actual sales,) or shipped to booksellers (gross sales) rather than net sales (copies shipped minus returns.) It's one of the reasons that a lot of people see book publishing as far more flush than it is -- because the publishing and bookselling industries present it that way as a marketing technique to sell books. Books have to matter for people to buy them, they have to be hot, and fiction authors -- even though they don't bring in as much money as say business authors or lifestyle non-fiction -- are the glamor babies who help with this, the show pony. And that means that they have to be seen as making money. It's one of the reasons the e-book market has been a big boon -- all of a sudden tech folk with all the money see book publishing as slightly sexy and are highlighting them, which means more media coverage, which means more stories about books and book publishing, which means you pad the numbers and the Wall Street Journal bothers to find out how long the average YA novel is. This is also why casual book pirates don't help and slow the development of the e-book industry down -- lots of e-books being bought is sexy, piracy nobody cares.

But in the Wall Street Journal case, it was probably just that they were lumping middle school novels together with YA novels. My very rough guess is that YA novels are on average in the 70,000-90,000 range for the most part, with fantasy novels being slightly longer on average. But there's a lot more range in lengths in children's/YA than there used to be ten years ago, not less.

What may also be occurring -- and that may be in the article -- is that some agents are getting told by some editors that they want to have some shorter novels as well as the longer versions in YA as product lines. And for agents, that means sales interest that they will certainly try to get their client list or new clients to fulfill. So you can look at it that if you have a shorter YA story, you have decent receptivity to it, but if you have a longer one, they are publishing those too. You have to look at what is actually in the market and what is upcoming in the publishers' catalog lists -- the whole market -- to see what is going on.

A few nights ago, I got to spend some time in a bookstore, waiting on my daughter, and since I hadn't been in the kids/YA section for a bit, I went and looked. And I was amused, given an earlier assertion of Laer's that there were hardly any male writers in YA and children's, (of which I dissuaded him,) because the display tables and shelves were covered with male author books, many of them bestsellers. But that of course has not stopped numerous articles about how women YA authors take over everything and write just for girls (which they don't either.)

But you also have to accept that what your one chain bookstore does is not all the market either, since it will actually vary greatly depending on where you live. Looking at the publishers' lists, at what's coming out, gives you a general idea of what they were buying six months to a year ago, when they reacted both to sales figures (browsing,) and to what authors were bringing to them (author browsing.)

[PeteMC]

Oh no, it wasn't that. It was what the publishers told them. They were padding. They do the same thing with the "average" salaries of lower rung employees.

Ah I see, I'm with you now. My industry (technology) does exactly the same thing, setting ludicrous salary expectations for new hires.

[Window Bar]

Not that this specifically adresses your question, but it may shed a tad of light on it:

In the eBook world (both for YA and Adult) 25k is often considered a "long." Less than 25k is a "short."

Very arbitrary, but also somewhat illustrative of the modern world's condensed attention span.

[JimF]

25K seems rather short to call something a book. By SFWA standards that is a Novella. I consider myself to be somewhat of a slow reader (I guess my lips don't move that fast) and I could finish that over a long lunch break.

On the one hand I know a story should only be as long as it needs to be, but when I am choosing something to read I look for longer books, smaller type. I want a long story I can sink into. Like Hamilton's stuff. Or maybe I'm just cheap and think I'm getting a better value for my money with a longer book.

For YA and eBooks is shorter books a marketing decision? Are they more likely to sell more with four 25K stories than one 100k story?

Jim

[Window Bar]

Vis-a-vis my earlier comment: The "short" vs "long" might just be to drop a hint to the prospective buyer that they might be paying for a short story, rather than a brand new Pulitzer Prize winning novel. It may mean nothing more than that.