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Topic : Re: 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), - selfpublishingguru.com

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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...


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