Hi, I'm new to all of this. I have a 6 year old and we are reading Billy and the giant adventure by Jamie Oliver. It's a book for 8+ and does have a lot of pictures. I have a general interest in history and we read the Trials of Hercules which is a picture book for a younger audience. I felt the story was odd especially since my daughter kept ask why Hercules was killing all these animals if he is the hero? So I've wanted to do a retelling of Hercules but where there is no killing but each beast the protagonist faces teaches a moral. It's been years and I've got my first chapter written and it's already 1376 words. I don't think word count wise I can consider this a picture book (which I'd prefer, I want the history and beasts elements to come alive not just in the writing) but I don't know if it will be big enough for a "Young Adults" story. Does anyone have any suggestions or know of similar picture books that are more like 5000-10,000 words? Ideally I'd like to make is marketable and that means fitting in with the parameters publishers come to expect. But if that doesn't work I'll look to self publish and it would be nice to hold something I created and read to my children. Thanks in advanced.
Aw, that's a really cute idea. From what I'm seeing, picture books are about 500 to 1,000 words. Young adult novels seem to fall at around 50,000 to 80,000 words. Middle grade novels average at about 25,000 to 40,000 words. You could make it into a short story, they're generally between 1,000 to 10,000 words, usually if it's a longer short story. If it's a short, short story then it'd be around 1,500 to 7,500. In my experience from when I was little, those are pretty good for young kids, especially those who love to read. Not too short but also not so long that they get bored. A novelette would be about 7,500 to 17,500 words. A novella would be about 17,500 to 50,000 words. I definitely recommend going for the short story angle. Don't worry about hitting the exact numbers because, as you can see, they can overlap. I think you can go a bit above the 10,000 word limit as long as you don't try to sell a 17,500 word limit book as a short story. At least I think that's how it works.
