How Long is a an average teen novel

[Kenny Curtin]

I am writing a teen oriented sort of book (Like Judy Bloom and Clueless or MAry Kate and Ashley)and I was wondering how long the average book for this genre is.
If you have any info send it to me at angel_lyter@hotmail.com

[KatG]

Naa, we'll just put it in the thread you started.

The average length of YA novels is on the shorter side -- 55,000-65,000 words or so. However, there are YA novels that are longer, and fantasy novels may run longer. Some children's publishers have specific length requirements -- they can't publish works over a certain length -- and others have more leeway. Check out the websites for publishers who are doing novels similar to what you have in mind and see if they have info on submitting to them (if they take unagented works which several of them still do,) and if so, whether they have length requirements.

You can also get a sense of average lengths by doing a rough estimate of published works word counts. Count how many lines are on a full printed page. Count how many words are in three different full lines of text. Average the number of words per the three lines. Multiply this average times the number of lines on a printed page. Multiply that by number of pages and round slightly downward.