Let's look a little closer at the length of chapters. The average chapter in Harry Potter is over 5,000 words or 20 pages.
When it comes to chapter length, there's no right or wrong answer. The average is around 1,500-8,000 words, but this also varies based on genre. For example, chapters in children's fiction are shorter than those in adult fiction because the audience expects them to be easier for younger readers.
Chapter length averages
On average, chapters tend to range from 1,000-5,000 words, with most falling in the 2,000-4,000 range. But chapters can be much longer or much shorter. There are plenty of bestselling books where some chapters are only a page and some where they don't even use chapters in the traditional sense.
The average paperback book ranges from 200 to 300 pages, averaging about 275 words per page. A 300-page book will have approximately 82,500 words total. With consistency, it's possible to reach that word count by writing 500 words per day, seven days a week, for about five and a half months.
50,000 words is 100 pages single-spaced or 200 pages double-spaced. Typical documents that are 50,000 words or more include full-length novels. It will take approximately 167 minutes to read 50,000 words.
100,000 words is 200 pages single-spaced or 400 pages double-spaced.
700,000 words is 1400 pages single-spaced or 2800 pages double-spaced. Typical documents that are 700,000 words or more include full-length novels. It will take approximately 2,333 minutes to read 700,000 words.
1,000,000 words is 2000 pages single-spaced or 4000 pages double-spaced. Typical documents that are 1,000,000 words or more include full-length novels. It will take approximately 3,333 minutes to read 1,000,000 words.
200,000 words is 400 pages single-spaced or 800 pages double-spaced. Typical documents that are 200,000 words or more include full-length novels. It will take approximately 667 minutes to read 200,000 words.
Writing 80,000 words will take about 33.3 hours for the average writer typing on a keyboard and 66.7 hours for handwriting. However, if the content needs to include in-depth research, links, citations, or graphics such as for a blog article or high school essay, the length can grow to 266.7 hours.
I used to say that 8,000–10,000 words was a good length for an academic book chapter (because I'd read that in multiple advice books), but I have found that most academic authors write longer chapters than that. And sometimes it takes 12,000 or 14,000 or 18,000 words to develop a chapter-worthy argument.
So if we're writing a 100,000-word novel, we'll have about 50 scene/chapters in our novel.
As a general rule, novels between 70,000 and 90,000 words will probably have anywhere between 15 and 25 chapters. But in the end, the number of chapters in your book should be secondary to your story.
At the longer end, I still wouldn't generally advise going over 5,000 words all that often. It's just a plot of text, and readers need to be able to put the book down now and again. At the shorter end, short can be very short. I've quite often written chapters that are 500 words or so.
Let's look a little closer at the length of chapters. The average chapter in Harry Potter is over 5,000 words or 20 pages. The shortest book, Philosopher's Stone (Book 1) also has the fewest average pages per chapter, while the longest book, Order of the Phoenix (Book 5) has the largest average pages per chapter.
For example, if you're writing for genres that have a word count range of 80,000-89,999 words (i.e. Mainstream, Thriller, Horror, Romance, Suspense, Mystery, and Literary) and you want to adhere to the 3,000–5,000 word count range per chapter, then that would probably entail about 16 to 30 chapters.
A 500,000 word count will create about 1000 pages with single spacing or 2000 pages double-spaced when using normal 1-inch margins, 12 pt. Arial font, and a standard A4 (letter size) page size.
400,000 words is 800 pages single-spaced or 1600 pages double-spaced. Typical documents that are 400,000 words or more include full-length novels.
450,000 words is 900 pages single-spaced or 1800 pages double-spaced. Typical documents that are 450,000 words or more include full-length novels. It will take approximately 1,500 minutes to read 450,000 words.
The average reader will read 500,000 words in 27.8 hours when reading at a speed of 300 words per minute (wpm).
For the whole Bible the total is 1189 chapters, 31,173 verses, 773,746 words arid 3,566,480 letters. The Apocrypha contains 14 fcooks, 1-83 chapters, 6081 verses, 152,185 words and 1,063,876 letters.
82 pages is 41,000 words when single-spaced or 20,500 words when double-spaced. A standard single-spaced page contains 500 words.
An 80,000-word book is about 320 pages. A 90,000-word book is about 360 pages. A 100,000-word book is about 400 pages.
280 to 400 pages: 70,000 to 100,000 words: Science Fiction / Fantasy: 360 to 400 pages: 90,000 to 100,000 words: Thriller / Horror / Mystery: 280 to 360 pages: 70,000 to 90,000 words: Young Adult: 240 to 360 pages: 60,000 to 90,000 words .
Visualizing one million
Information: Not counting spaces, the text printed on 136 pages of an Encyclopædia Britannica, or 600 pages of pulp paperback fiction contains approximately one million characters.