Writing 101: Length

When does a manuscript cross the line between short story and novel? How long are most books in your genre? When is it a good idea to step outside the box and break the rules? Length is a huge issue in writing books -- make sure you give it the proper respect.

Measuring Length

One hundred pages, eighty thousand words, two thousand lines of text -- the first step in measuring length is using the right yardstick. Lots of writers know exactly how many pages they've written in how many chapters; some can even tell you the amount of days that pass in their story, or maybe how long (to the minute) the book took to write. It's all well and good to know your page count, average chapter length and all those other fun statistics, but when it comes to determining book length there's only one measurement: word count.

Thanks to modern-day computers, a great many writers can simply choose an option and find out exactly how many words are in their manuscript (it's under Tools). But it's not a bad idea to know how to figure out how to determine word count without modern technology -- just in case.

On pages designed one with standard one-inch margins and written in a double-spaced, 12-point non-proportional font, you'll have an average of 250 words on each page. Count the pages, do the math, and you've got your word count.

But let's not forget, we live in a word with modern technology...and the Internet. If you've got to have an accurate word count and your software won't play nice, look for an online word count tool to get the job done. 

How Long is Too Long...Or Too Short?

Do you have a short story, a novella, a full-length novel? Does your word count match your genre? There are no hard-and-fast rules in self-publishing, but it's not a bad idea to know what the competition is going to be putting out. Knowing the industry standards for word length gives you an edge, because you'll know how the traditionally-published are playing the game.

Traditionally, short stories fall between 2,000 and 7,000 words, while novellas begin at 7,000 and start to become too big at 17,000 words.Young adult novels generally fall between 50,000 and 60,000 words, while full-length novels for adults are generally around 80,000 to 100,000. Novels over 100,000 words in length are usually considered to be epic novels, and they can spring up in any genre.

You don't always have to play by the rules. Remember that your story should be only as long as it needs to be to tell the whole story. Good books are allowed to break the rules, and great books usually end up making them. Respect and know your word count, but above all respect the story you've got to tell -- because that's what really matters to readers. Mainly, you need to know your word count so you know exactly how to classify and market your book. Don't advertise a novella when you've written a 200,000-word monster. 

Guest Post: 5 Ways to Get Noticed and Earn a Full-Time Writing Job

by Brittany Behrman

Learning the basics of writing, Writing 101, is the first step in getting published. However, once you’ve established that you have the talent and knowhow to push forward toward making it big, how do you support yourself in the meantime?

You could find a job in an unrelated field, which may distract you from your writing and delay your success, or you can work towards refining the skills it takes to finish a great manuscript and make money doing so!
The first step in starting your writing career, whether you aim to work full-time or freelance, is building your experience and developing your portfolio to attract potential employers. I’ve put together a list of the five ways that I worked towards positioning myself above some of the steep competition in the industry and starting a career in writing to escape an in-the-meantime job.

I am excited for the opportunity to share my experience here with Jade Varden’s Official Blog’s readers! I hope that by following some of my suggestions, you’ll be able to grow as a writer and find employment doing what you love!

Read the five tips here.

About the author: Brittany Behrman began her writing career prior to college graduation reporting for her school’s newspaper and contributing to two sponsored blogs. Since earning her B.A. at Rutgers University in Journalism and Media Studies in 2009, she has spent the majority of her time freelancing and bouncing around the job market. In her tireless search for a writing position, she perfected these five tips and is now approaching her one year anniversary writing full-time for the Performance Marketing Agency, DMi Partners, and an education portal for online colleges, eCollegeFinder.org.

Review: Dragon Fire

I expected Pedro Alvarez's Dragon Fire to be chock-full of fantasy cliches, but the story took several turns I never saw coming. At its heart, Dragon Fire is a love story about the bonds between a kingdom and her people.

Adventure, romance, mysticism, prophecies, magic, swordplay -- it's all here. The story has healthy doses of all the elements that make for a thrilling fantasy tale, but it still manages to be completely original. The characters jump off the page (or the eReader), rich and real, each growing and changing in their own ways throughout the book.

The book is perfectly formatted and beautifully written, but that's not why it's so easy to read. The story builds and flows, and it pulled me along with it. From the dramatic beginning to the epic conclusion, Dragon Fire is a fantastic read. I look forward to reading many more books from this talented author.

Writing 101: Format

Formatting is a big deal in self-publishing, and it's the one thing many indie authors let fall by the wayside. Doesn't every reader have the right to expect the books they read to look like all the other books they've read? If you're going to write, you're going to need to start thinking about your format from the very first word. Otherwise, you're just making more work for yourself to create a story that's ready for publishing.

Standard Formats

AP, MLA, APA -- there are a lot of different formats out there when it comes to article writing, and book writing is no different. Poems always have a certain format, and so does prose. Unless it truly adds something valuable to your work, you should always conform to the standard formats for the type of work you are producing. To do otherwise may alienate and infuriate readers, which is the very last thing any writer wants. Writing prose is pretty easy, format-wise, because basically there are only two you can choose:

• Fiction

In fiction writing, most books adhere to a standard format that features paragraph indentations. In this format, the first line of every paragraph is indented (usually one tab stop, or five spaces). There is no blank line or separation between these paragraphs unless the author has put it there purposefully to separate their scenes within a chapter.

Writers may choose to break text up into as many chapters as they like, with as much text as they like, in order to create suspense and interest. Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, wrote a chapter in his most famous novel that took up only one line. The number of chapters isn't necessarily important, but indentations are. The blank spaces help to naturally separate the paragraphs and make the long blocks of text readable.

New speakers within dialogue must always begin their own new paragraph. Even if you are writing very short exchanges -- "How are you?" "Fine." -- you must put words from separate speakers into separate paragraphs.

• Non-Fiction

Non-fiction writing differs from fiction writing when it comes to formatting. Reference texts are not divided by chapters but by category, commonly alphabetically. Indentations are not often used in non-fiction texts. Instead, writers create their prose in block text. Each paragraph is separated by a single, blank line to create space between the large chunks of text. Non-fiction texts may also contain footnotes, which appear in small lettering at the bottoms of pages.


Formatting Your Work

Save yourself some time by formatting your writing as you write it. Simply create your writing in your favorite word processing program, always being mindful of maintaining proper formatting for your piece. Later, you will have to do additional work in order to format your writing for various eReaders. To make things easy on yourself, manually convert your story files into .TXT or .HTML and use formatting software, like Mobi, to make your writing eReader-friendly. If you start out with strong formatting in the first place, you'll spend a lot less time carefully editing your work to make it readable for your audience.

Review: The Trio: A Collection of Completely Unrelated Short Stories

I wasn't planning to read all of The Trio: A Collection of Completely Unrelated Short Stories in one sitting, but I just couldn't put the Kindle down until I'd read every word. The first story grabbed me right away, and instantly I became a depressed alcoholic with a lifetime of sadness to endure.That's just the beginning of the emotional ride Alyse Bingham creates with her Trio.

 

Each one of the three stories in the collection is completely different. Each provides insight into the main characters, just briefly enough to leave me wishing for much more. Bingham's Trio is well-written, well formatted and well edited. Technically it's beautiful, but the book is easy and enjoyable to read not simply because the writer knows where to put her commas. The stories are truly heartfelt and filled with emotion, forcing me into having a strong response every time. I can't wait to read more of Bingham's works in the future. One trio of stories just isn't enough.

Review: Hansel and Gretel 2

I admit it: I don't usually read fairy tales, children's books or any of the above. But David L. Dawson's Hansel and Gretel 2: The Reckoning is a quick read, and I've started to become obsessed with fairy tales again thanks to Once Upon a Time. I'm glad I decided to download the Kindle version of this short story, because it turns out you're never too old for a good fairy tale sequel.

The sequel to the age-old, well-known story reveals a different side to those sweet-faced, breadcrumb-leaving youths of my youth. If you've ever suspected that there's something weird about a gingerbread house in the woods, or wondered how two little kids managed to overpower a woman fortified on fresh child meat, you'll probably enjoy this short story, too.

Dawson's story is refreshing, and somehow it feels both modern and classic at the same time. It's time someone started to reveal the real story behind all those wonderful old tales -- because really, you should never trust kids who throw bread around in the woods.

One Lie Can Destroy All Truths...

 Read an excerpt from Justice at Indie Snippets!

One Lie Can Destroy All Truths #YA #Mystery

Writing 101: Getting Technical

Character development, plot, point of view, all these things help to create a book...but at the end of the story, they're all supporting players. The backbone of any book, of every book, is the technical aspect -- and this is what many indie authors neglect.

Let's Talk Tech

Writers are creative types, with big imaginations. They spin stories, weave plots and invent characters that become as real as the people in our own families. The writer is like an artist painting on a canvas. They're thinking about which colors to use, where to draw the lines, how to add shadows and nuances to certain elements of the big picture. And with all that going on, it's probably easy for the painter to shop thinking about the canvas that's being painted upon. But the writer can't ever forget all those technical details that matter so much -- the canvas on which the words are written.

• Clean it up. All it takes is one misplaced comma for a reader to get taken out of the story they're reading. A glaring grammatical error, a quotation mark that's totally out of place, a badly-written line can be enough to turn a reader off any book. I once put down a novel because the writer put the apostrophe in the wrong place in the word "y'all." Apostrophes are very important to me. Always clean up your work. Edit and re-edit to fix spelling, grammar and punctuation errors.
• Format it properly. Make your book look like a book. This is pretty simple advice -- some might say it's rather ridiculous even to bring it up -- but so many writers just ignore their formatting. Buy your book after you publish it online, and look at it with your own eyes. You should have paragraph indents or clean block paragraphs, chapter headings that stand out and a uniform look throughout. Readers aren't going to waste time on a book that's hard to read because it's not formatted well. 

Get Technical

Independent authors feel a lot of pressure to work quickly, to create their books as soon as possible in order to satisfy their current audience and continue to build upon it. But you can't afford to skip the little technical details that make your work look professional and well done. Take the time to edit, and download proper software to format your book so that it looks attractive. Free ebook software is available (I personally use Mobi) that makes it easy to get proper formatting. It takes extra time to work all those tedious technical details, but your readers will appreciate the effort.