Welcome back to the YA Fundamental series, lovely authors! Today I’m talking about word count in YA manuscripts, which is something I see my clients getting in a muddle over all the time. And for good reason! There’s lots of conflicting advice out there, and just when you think you’ve got a handle on the ideal book length in your demographic and genre, you pick up a bestseller that’s 50,000 words longer! So, what is the magic number?

As always, the rules about book length aren’t set in stone but there are conventions and expectations for each age bracket so it’s important to understand these before making choices about your own manuscript. If you’re seeking traditional publication, you want agents to see you as professional and well-informed about your industry, and submitting a YA book that’s short enough to be middle grade or needs cutting in half can indicate that you haven’t done your research and don’t understand the market.

If you’re self-publishing, you don’t want to hurt your chances of success by putting out a book that doesn’t appeal to teenagers because it’s way too short. So, let’s look at those conventions!

YA word counts typically range from around 50,000 to 90,000, with fantasy and sci-fi often going a little longer to account for the world building and plot complexity those genres demand.

As you probably know, YA novels are typically longer than middle grade and that’s partly because teenagers are likely to be more confident, practised readers than younger children but also because the themes YA explores are often heavier and authors may need that extra space to explore them thoroughly.

Here are the word counts for some bestselling YA genre novels:

• • Divergent: 105,143
  • The Hunger Games: 99,750
  • Twilight: 119,000
  • One of Us is Lying: 92,000
  • Children of Blood and Bone: 134,250

As you can see, YA fantasy is currently trending towards the heftier end of the range!

Almost all the manuscripts I work on with authors are too long, but by the time I’ve finished my developmental edit or manuscript critique I’ve highlighted lots of sections – sometimes entire chapters – that can be trimmed back or removed and saved for a future book. So, don’t panic too much about your word count when you’re writing your first draft. Keep the length guidelines in mind and aim to stay within them, but if your manuscript goes over, you can fix this during the editing stage.

But do bear in mind that the longer your manuscript is, the more expensive a professional editor or proofreader will be later down the line if you choose to hire one. That’s because editors base their quote (in part) on your word count, so it pays to do the hard work now, in your own revision process, before reaching out to a professional. That doesn’t mean you should write a shorter novel in order to save money on editing, but if you know that your manuscript is bloated and unwieldy or just not the right length for your intended audience, ask yourself those tough questions I mentioned above and tighten your novel now, so that your editor is only working with the bits of the story that absolutely have to be there.

Read more in the YA Fundamentals series:

• • What age group is YA for?
  • How old should my YA main character be?
  • What subjects and themes should YA include? (coming soon!)
  • Can I include edgy content? (coming soon!)