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Hi, Scott! I know you already got your answers but I wanted to say a couple more things, in case it would help.

Never forget that it’s your story, and you can write whatever you want, in whatever style you want, for whatever length you want.

But if you’re trying to be a published author, especially traditionally published, you ought to be aware of what your market (the people who will buy your book) would like. That’s why, before writing, Gord gave this advice to plan out everything before you put a word down. I took that pretty personally to mean you ought to plan out how long you’re going for too.

To look for the “right” amount of words in a book, don’t look at successful books. I mean it. Like Raymond said, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is a good 25k words longer than the average middle grade book. You have to be aware that you are not a famous, published author. You are going to be a new author and this will be your debut book, so it’d generally be easier to get more traction if you made your book fit into the categories of the average book length in that range.

Look at your genre and then your category (age range.) Middle Grade books land between 25k to 50k words, Young Adult books generally land between 55k and 80k words, and Adult books land around 90k. These aren’t rules, they’re stats.

Now, here is a quote from a literary agent, Kelly Peterson:
“MG: Fantasy/Sci-Fi – 35k-65k, with Upper MG only hitting the 50k-65k.

YA: Fantasy/Sci-Fi – 80k-99k (sweet spot = 85k-95k. Don’t hit that 100k mark!)”

I’m not sure what realistic fiction looks like, but it can also help to look up “average debut novel (genre) (category) word count” in your search engine.

For formatting: Generally agents like Times-New-Roman, double spaced, 12pt font, but this can change for everyone! (Make sure you format correctly,  don’t use tabs!

Now, this is me piggybacking off of what Raymond was saying with “Microsoft Word, Scrivener, Grammarly, and dozens of other writing tools offer a “word count” function”

1. I don’t recommend using Google Docs for “writing”, or at least formatting, because it doesn’t translate well with other writing resources. I said that strangely. Basically, Docs has a really weird indention feature that jacks it up when you format it in Word, or Scrivener, or literally anything else. 

2. Everything Raymond just said was awesome. Grammarly is quite good. Personally, if I want to check small WCs I use “https://wordcounter.net/”, but for big ones, Word and Docs will tell you the WC. 

3. More writing resources. I recommend Sonovel, it’s basically Scrivener except it’s free (and constantly updating). I can also recommend you some more writing resources if you want. Some that I would die for:

a) The Most Dangerous Writing App (It’s wonderful for getting you out of writer’s block or just into writing. It requires that you write non-stop for any certain amount of time, and if you stop for more than a second or two, it deleted all your previous words. So cool!) 

Sorry, I had to go. HMU for more resources! Hope I could be helpful!

And don’t forget, this is YOUR story!

Be blessed,

Jade