How Long Should a Chapter Be? Tips for Finding the Right Breaks in Your Book

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If you’re writing a book, you may have found that you can breeze your way through some chapters, but struggle through others, which means that some chapters end up longer than others. But does it matter how long your chapters are? 

In this post, we will look at the intricacies of writing chapters in a book and how chapter length plays a role in setting the pace of a novel or a nonfiction book. Then, we will also look at the average length range for a comfortable but engaging read. 

Why Chapter Length Matters

Some fiction authors like to write long chapters, while others lean toward the shorter side. But chapter length, especially in a novel, is hardly arbitrary. 

The length of the chapters in a book is crucial for guiding the reader’s journey through the entire story. Although many novels have chapters of about the same length all throughout, unexpectedly long or short chapters can effectively change the storytelling pace at critical moments. 

For example, if your novel contains an average of 3,000 words per chapter and you suddenly insert a 400-word chapter, your reader will definitely sit up and pay attention. 

How Long Should a Chapter Be?

The industry average for a book’s chapter length is about 8–10 pages. Because font sizes may vary, a more logical method is to aim for an average word count. Although this differs depending on the genre you are writing in, the average range is between 1,500–5,000 words per chapter.

Thrillers, mystery novels, and young adult literature tend to have shorter chapters. Think of books by Dan Brown, James Patterson, and R.L. Stine. Meanwhile, literary fiction and classics tend to have longer chapters with a higher word count. 

For examples of chapter word counts, take a look at this list:

Some authors keep their chapter lengths fairly standardized, while others mix them up a bit. For example, Jane Austen’s Persuasion seems to have longer chapters the farther you get into the book, which some critics believe help to build them up to a crescendo. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, in contrast, has more evenly-paced chapters. 

Dividing a Nonfiction Book into Chapters

When it comes to nonfiction books, the chapter divisions serve as markers for the reader so they understand what to expect. Each chapter will normally cover a specific theme, so that when the chapter ends, the reader knows that the next chapter will deal with something different.

For nonfiction books, we have the following tips for making clean and logical chapter breaks:

  1. View the first and last page of a chapter as book-ends for your topic.
  2. Introduce a new chapter with an opening story.
  3. Conclude with paragraphs that summarize what you talked about throughout the chapter.
  4. Consider organizing chapters with a similar theme under an umbrella “unit” or “part.”

For example, in the book The Book That Transforms Nations by Loren Cunningham, we have the following divisions:

  • Part I. We Can Win It All or Lose It All – This part has 5 chapters, each developing the theme of the importance of impacting the world.
  • Part II. Portraits of Transformation – Under this umbrella unit, the author writes nine chapters, each chapter featuring a person from a different country who applied the principles laid down in Part I.
  • Parts III to V talk about other relevant topics to the theme of the book, but each part only has a few chapters to get its point across.

Deciding Chapter Length 

Although the publishing industry has standard lengths for chapters in a novel, those standards may not always be a telltale sign of a well-written book. Instead, as an author, you should concentrate on telling your story as well as possible. 

A good way to think about chapters is to see them as a mini-story in the context of the whole book. That way, you can focus on writing the mini-story without worrying too much about word count, but knowing you can sum up everything tidily and in a way that satisfies your readers.

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