How Many Pages In A Book Are Typical For A Fantasy Novel?

Typical fantasy novels come in at 350-500 pages or so. You can’t really do the genre justice in anything much shorter than that; there are a lot of details to include, such as maps, lots of different factions, and plenty of dragons. While authors like Tolkien and Martin can generally write as long as they like, the newer generation of authors is typically bound by the 400-page mark — unless they’re self-publishing. As for whether sword-and-sorcery or epic fantasy is longer, sword-and-sorcery tends to be the shorter of the two, but even so, it’s generally a book of around 120k words or so, which translates to about 400 printed pages.

Most Fantasy Novels Fall Between 300 and 600 Pages. This has much to do with the subgenre and even author style. As I have stated before, High Fantasy Novels (such as The Way of Kings and The Name of the Wind) can easily be over 800 pages long as there is just so much worldbuilding to put into these types of novels. On the other hand, YA Fantasy is typically much shorter and more to the point as seen in Six of Crows which is approximately 400 pages of story.

I've heard of traditional publishing capping debut authors at 120k words (about 400 pages) to keep costs down, but this isn't a rule that established authors are bound by. Self-published works are more commonly longer than not, and almost always benefit from editting to keep them from getting too long. In terms of physical editions, page count can vary wildly between different formats of the same book. Generally a mass market paperback will pack more words per page than a trade paperback, but that's not always the case. I'd argue that 450 pages is just about the right length for most fantasy books - enough room to get into the nitty gritty of magic systems and politics, but not so much that it becomes exhausting to read.

Note that some trilogies are simply longer than others. First books in a trilogy can be slimmer than subsequent volumes (The Final Empire is 541 pages, but The Hero of Ages clocks in at 725 pages). There’s a line between giving a reader enough to get lost in, and giving them too much. Often a debut novel will come in around the 120k word/400 page mark, but a published author can write as long as they like. Many self-published novels, however, go on at length past the point of interest to the reader. If a novel of the fantasy genre comes in under 250 pages, it’s likely either an urban fantasy or a novella.

A question that my writing group continuously bickers over involves how long a story of a certain “typical” length for specific sub-genres of fantasy should be. While the epic fantasy fans insist that their stories should clock in at a minimum of 150,000 words, the contemporary fantasy fans are gunning for 90,000. I’m on the other end of the spectrum for my weird, atmospheric stories that usually top out at around 70,000 words or so. There’s no right answer here, just what is best for the story in question and what the current market for said story of that particular length would be willing to pay for it. An agent looking at my 70,000 word or so fantasy may declare it too short while an agent reviewing my friend’s 150,000+ word contemporary fantasy would swear that it’s far too long. The term “typical” in this case would refer to a moving target that’s influenced by a host of different factors outside of the umbrella genre of fantasy itself.