However, keep in mind when we talked about how people don't know how to edit their work. Memoir is the same as a novel and that means you're aiming for 80,000-89,999. There wasn't a whole about this on agent and editor sites, but from what I found, these can be anywhere from 50K to 80K. 65,000 is a solid number to aim for.
I remember reading some Westerns in high school and, if I recall correctly, they weren't terribly long. ( Deconstructing five spooky picture books with spoilers and word counts.) WORD COUNT FOR WESTERNS With a simpler middle grade idea ( Football Hero, or Jenny Jones and the Cupcake Mystery), aim lower. You can stray a little over here but not much. These are books that resemble young adult in matter and storytelling, but still tend to stick to MG themes and avoid hot-button, YA-acceptable themes such as sex, drugs and rock & roll. With upper middle grade, you can aim for 40,000-55,000 words. When writing a longer book that is aimed at 12-year-olds (and could maybe be considered "tween"), using the term "upper middle grade" is advisable. Middle grade is from 20,000-55,000, depending on the subject matter and age range, and the word count of these books has been trending up in recent years. Outside of that, I would say 90K-100K is most likely all right, and 115-124K is probably all right, too. That said, try to keep it in the ideal range. The thing is: Writers tend to know that these categories run long so they make them run really long and hurt their chances. There's nothing wrong with keeping it short (say, 105K) in these areas. It shows that you can whittle your work down. It's six-figures long, but not real long.
With these genres, I would say 100,000-115,000 is an excellent range. What writers fail to see is that for every successful exception to the rule (e.g., a first-time 175,000-word novel), there are at least 100 failures if not 300. Aiming to be the exception is setting yourself up for disappointment. However, if there is one thing I remember from when my wife dragged me kicking and screaming to He's Just Not That Into You, it's that you cannot count on being the exception you must count on being the rule. And man, people love to point out exceptions-and they always will. The most important thing here is to realize that there are always exceptions to these rules. ( 20 Literary Agents Actively Seeking Writers and Their Writing.) Word count for novels and books is something I don't think about too often until I travel to a writers' conference, and then someone asks a simple, innocent question: "How long should a book be?" With that in mind, I've tried to put together the definitive post on word count for fiction (novels, young adult, middle grade, children's books and even memoir).
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