Is My Book Long Enough?

Happy New Year!!! Welcome to 2021!!!!

My favorite time of year because it’s perfectly acceptable to go crazy with exclamation marks. Happy New Year!!! Welcome to 2021!!!!

We have all sorts of New Year’s festivities coming up in the Writer's Block Community, including the 7-Day Writing & Yoga Challenge to get your creativity flowing on January 12th - 18th.

Check Monday, January 4th, because I will be announcing a contest before everything starts!

For now, this is one of the biggest questions I get: “Is my book long enough?”

So let’s start by getting that worry into perspective. Therefore I have put together a list of Super famous, award-winning, bestselling, world-rocking books of every word count from 13,000 to 325,000.  

Here goes:

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: 5,800 words.

The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu: 9,570 words.

The Dip by Seth Godin: 13,630 words.

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros: 20,010 words.

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin: 21,025.

Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy: 21, 460 words.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka: 22,185 words.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote: 24,650 words.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens: 27,405 words.

Coraline by Neil Gaiman: 31,175 words.

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson: 32,045 words.

The Universe has Your Back by Gabrielle Bernstein: 39,295 words.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl: 41,180 words.

I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai: 42,485 words.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury: 43,645 words.

Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert: 44,370 words.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: 49,155 words.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe: 56,550 words.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston: 58,580 words.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker: 69,310 words.

Naked by David Sedaris: 72,750 words

Untamed by Glennon Doyle: 72,790 words.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: 80,000 words.

The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria: 82,505 words.

Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling: 83,085 words.

Animal Liberation by Peter Singer: 93,090 words.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera: 90,335 words.

How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi: 93,235 words.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien: 96,425 words.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini: 104,545 words.

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen: 108,605 words

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: 122,380 words.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens: 138,000 words.

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown: 144,065 words.

The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan: 151,235 words.

Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mohandas K. Gandhi: 162,690 words.

The House of Spirits by Isabelle Allende: 163,995 words.

Becoming by Michelle Obama: 165,735 words

Dune by Frank Herbert: 182,990 words.

Jane Eyre by Emily Bronte: 184,875 words.

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hollows by J.K. Rowling: 188,065 words.

Midnight’s Children by Salmon Rushdie: 223,155 words.

A Course in Miracles by the Foundation For Inner Peace: 333,250 words.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: 345,680 words.

IQ84 by Haruki Murakami: 406,725 words.

These are all estimates based on the length of the audiobooks, from this fun source I discovered and played around with for way too long: https://www.readinglength.com. But it just goes to show you, it doesn’t matter how much you write, as long as you say what you need to say.