Short story, novelette or novella? The word counts that decide it, rulebook by rulebook

The four lengths in the Hugo and Nebula rules

A short story is under 7,500 words, a novelette 7,500 to 17,500, a novella 17,500 to 40,000 and a novel 40,000 or more. Those boundaries are written into two rulebooks: the World Science Fiction Society's constitution, which governs the Hugo Awards (sections 3.3.1 to 3.3.4, as of 7 October 2025), and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association's Nebula rules, effective from the award year beginning 1 January 2026 (rule 8).

The Nebula wording settles the edges the Hugo wording leaves open: a story of exactly 7,500 words is a novelette, and one of exactly 17,500 a novella. The page figures use the 328 words a double-spaced page that Simple Online Counter's words per page calculator measures for Times New Roman; in Courier New, at about 221 words a page, a 7,500-word story is about 34 pages.

Both rulebooks are for science fiction and fantasy, and both count the text, not the medium: the Hugo constitution (3.2.7) opens the story categories to print, ebook and audiobook alike. For translated work, the Nebula rules use the English word count, and the Hugo rules let the Worldcon committee set a conversion ratio from the original language (3.2.8).

The same story under four award rulebooks

Only the Hugo and Nebula rules have a novelette; the Bram Stoker Awards and the World Fantasy Awards use two shorter categories, and they draw the line in different places. The table puts the four rulebooks side by side, each read on 4 November 2026.

The Horror Writers Association's 2026 rules (rules IVj and IVk) define long fiction as "at least 7,500 words in length but no more than 39,999 words", and short fiction as no more than 7,499. The World Fantasy Convention's 2026 submissions page lists "Best Novella (10,001 to 40,000 words)" and asks publishers to include word counts for short stories and novellas; it gives no number for Best Novel or Best Short Story, so the short-story ceiling of 10,000 follows from where the novella starts.

The two-category rulebooks also settle the stories that sit close to a line. The Stoker rules say a work "so close to 7,500 words" that the count cannot decide it is long fiction, and a work close to 40,000 is a novel if it was first published as a book on its own and long fiction if it first appeared in a magazine, anthology or collection.

Why the guides give different numbers

Most of the figures in the ranking guides are borrowed from different rulebooks and publishers, usually without saying which, and two have no source at all. Checked on 4 November 2026, the top results gave these novelette and novella ranges:

The overlapping ranges are where readers get stuck. Jericho Writers gives the novelette as 7,500 to 19,000 words and the novella as 10,000 to 40,000, so a 15,000-word story is both on the same page. Dabble gives the short story as 1,000 to 20,000 words, which swallows its own novelette range. Neither error matters when you write; both matter when you fill in a form that asks for a category.

The correction worth knowing: "novelette" is an awards word, not a publishing one. No magazine guideline read for this guide uses it. Asimov's says it seldom buys stories "longer than 20,000 words"; Analog lists "short fiction (up to approximately 20,000 words)" and serials of 40,000 to 80,000; neither names a novelette. Publishers sell novellas as books, and magazines buy stories by the word, so the novelette exists mainly as the middle box on the Hugo and Nebula ballots.

The Hugo 20% rule, worked out

The Hugo Awards let the Worldcon committee move a story into a neighbouring category if its length is within 20% of that category's limits, so every Hugo boundary is really a band. Section 3.2.10 of the WSFS constitution says the committee "may relocate a story into a more appropriate category if it feels that it is necessary, provided that the length of the story is within twenty percent (20%) of the new category limits". The Nebula rules have no such tolerance; the Nebula Awards Commissioner decides placement, subject to appeal.

Each figure is the boundary times 0.8 or 1.2. A 19,800-word novella is within 20% of the novelette's upper limit (21,000), so it could be placed in Best Novelette; a 22,000-word novella could not. The rule says "may": the committee moves a story only "if it feels that it is necessary", so the band is a possibility, not an entitlement.

Three stories, checked against the rules and the markets

The same manuscript can be a novelette for one award, a short story for another and too long for the market you wanted, so check each destination separately. Three examples, using the rules above and markets' own guidelines read on 4 November 2026.

A 9,000-word story

• Hugo and Nebula: novelette (7,500 or more). By the 20% rule it is also inside the Hugo band of 6,000 to 9,000, so a committee could place it in Best Short Story.
• Bram Stoker: long fiction. World Fantasy: short story (10,000 or under).
• Markets: inside Uncanny's 750 to 10,000 words and Asimov's 1,000 to 20,000; over the Commonwealth Short Story Prize maximum of 5,000, and over four times the Bath Short Story Award's 2,200-word limit for 2026.
• Pay at Asimov's: the guidelines say "8-10 cents per word for short stories up to 7,500 words, and 8 cents for each word over 7,500". Read that way, 7,500 words earn $600 to $750 and the other 1,500 earn $120: $720 to $870 in all.

An 18,200-word story

• Hugo and Nebula: novella (17,500 or more), and inside the Hugo band of 14,000 to 21,000, so it could be placed in Best Novelette. Bram Stoker: long fiction. World Fantasy: novella.
• Markets: inside Asimov's and Analog's ceiling of about 20,000 words, and under the 20,000 that Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine says makes a story less likely to be published, though far above its preferred 2,500 to 8,000.
• Too long for the Writers of the Future contest, whose limit is "up to but not exceeding 17,000 words", by 1,200 words; too short for Tor.com Publishing's 2018 novella call, which took 20,000 to 40,000 words, by 1,800.

A 35,000-word novella

• Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy: novella. Bram Stoker: long fiction. It is inside the Hugo band of 32,000 to 48,000, so a committee could move it to Best Novel.
• Markets: too long for every magazine guideline above. Analog's page jumps from short fiction of about 20,000 words to serials of 40,000 to 80,000, and Asimov's says it does not serialise novels. A story of this length usually goes to a publisher that sells novellas as books.
• Reading time: about 2 hours 15 minutes at 260 words a minute, the average silent reading rate for fiction in Marc Brysbaert's 2019 review of 190 studies (Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 109).

What markets buy, by length

Most magazines that state a length buy stories from about 1,000 to 20,000 words, so a story of 20,000 to 40,000 words has few magazine homes. Each figure below is the market's own, from its own page.

Two things follow from the table. A story's length decides its market before its genre does: a 12,000-word mystery is too long for most of what Ellery Queen prints, while a 12,000-word science fiction story is mid-range for Asimov's. And the word "novella" is used loosely even by competitions: the Bath Novella-in-Flash Award accepts 6,000 words, which the Hugo rules would call a short story.

Counting the words the way a market will

None of these rulebooks or guidelines says which tool to count with, so use your word processor's count of the story text and state it the way the market asks. The Bram Stoker rules count the central narrative "without commentary, footnotes, alternate paths, or other optional adjuncts", and that is a good habit everywhere: the title, byline and contact block are not the story. Which words of the title take a capital is a separate question, answered by style guide in title case rules.

On prose, counting methods differ by little: across the sixteen classic novels counted for the novel length guide, a count of runs between spaces came out 0.1% to 1.9% below a count that splits words at dashes. That only matters within a few hundred words of a boundary, where a 7,450-word story in one tool could be over 7,500 in another. The guide to why word counts differ shows the same text under four rules. Near a line, count in more than one tool and state the higher figure, so no reader's count puts the story in a different category from the one you entered.

Manuscripts state a rounded count on the first page; the standard manuscript format guide explains rounding to the nearest hundred. A category form is different: give the exact count, because 17,480 and 17,520 words are in different Nebula categories. The word counter gives the exact figure and the fiction reading time. A novella that goes on to print alone as a paperback is priced by its page count, which KDP's printing cost formula turns into a cost per copy.

What this guide does not cover

This guide covers the word-count definitions of short fiction categories in four award rulebooks and the lengths a sample of English-language magazines and competitions state. It does not cover:

• Novels by genre, covered in the guide to how many words are in a novel.
• Picture books, chapter books and middle-grade fiction, which publishers measure differently.
• Non-fiction and essays, and literary magazines that state no length.
• Query letters and synopses for a novel, covered in how long a query letter and synopsis should be.

Rules change each award year and guidelines change when markets open and close, so treat every figure here as correct for 4 November 2026 and check the page itself before you submit. Simple Online Counter is a free, browser-based set of counters and writing tools; its word counter counts a story in the browser without uploading it.