: How many words minimum? I submitted a query and was told my book is too short for mainstream publishing, as it comes in around 25,000 words. Does anyone have feedback for how many words

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The common figure for the length of a novel (since before I started submitting for publication in the early 1980s) was a minimum of about fifty thousand words. Below that figure, between twenty thousand and fifty thousand was a "novella" and between ten thousand and twenty thousand a "novelette".

In today's environment of electronic self-publishing, a novella can be published as a stand-alone work, but a publishing house may not want such a work because it costs about as much to produce as a novel, but can't be sold for the same cover price.

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