: How long can a Children's Novel be? I'm currently writing a realism fantasy novel targeted for a 9-12 age group. Since it became so long(the first draft turned out to be at least 90,000 words),

Vote Up Vote Down

It's certainly possible to write children's books of any length. However, all other things being equal, publishers tend to prefer shorter books, because they are cheaper to print. Clearly, however, a book can't be too short, or the reader will feel cheated. For an adult audience, the minimum length of a novel starts around 55k words, so something in the 65-80k range is ideal.
For youth audiences, novels can be as short as 30k, particularly for MG readers, so 50-70k is a reasonable target. But 80k is still in the right ballpark. I wouldn't see that being particularly hard to sell, if it's well written.
I'm more concerned that you describe your own book as a "long and tiresome journey" with episodic mini-conflicts. That doesn't sound like a fun read at any length. Given that, I'd look into whether or not the book needs to be tightened up structurally, rather than focusing on whether or not you're being too wordy. Maybe the journey doesn't need to be quite so long and tiresome...

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

Children's books can be a bit longer than that as long as they don't get too adult. Harry Potter started out for children and became young adults, but before it made the jump from "children" to "YA," some of the books were more lengthy. If you don't want/see that happening you need to keep the theme appropriate for children.
You can always ask young kids in your life what their favorite books are and look up the word count for that; it's an easy way to get a scope on if your book might be too long.
As long as it isn't 90,00+ words and the theme is kid-appropriate, 80k words should be okay.
I hope this helped :)

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

There is no right answer. You can do something as short as 100 pages if you want, or go beyond 300 pages. There's the Percy Jackson series(plus all the other series in the same universe) that are about 200-300 pages each. There's the Harry Potter series which get longer the farther along in the series you get. There's shorter stories that hover around 100 pages(although most of them are stand alone stories). There's so much variation that there can be no right answer.
What I think a good length would be is however long you can keep them interested. If you really need to test your length, then find a few 9-12 year olds and hand them the book. ask them to read it, and when the finish to tell you how long it took and what the thought. If they take a few weeks, your book is either too long and boring or they forgot it in the back of their closet. You should probably get the book back in 1-3 days if you did good.

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

It's not too long if it's good enough. I had a look on my shelf and I can see a couple of the Skullduggery Pleasant series that are long. The last of the Raven's Gate series is seriously long.
However, I think you might be able to cut some of the words. Start with description. If you have any paragraphs of just description, consider cutting them down to a single sentence. Kids tend to skip long passages of description. Actually, as an adult, I do too.
Can some of the direct speech be left out or become indirect speech?
Have you used 'ly' adverbs and too many adjectives?
Stephen King is big on cutting words out. Have you read his book 'On Writing'?

(0)