All About Story Lengths and Packaging

Short Stories to Long Novels, and
Anthologies, Collections, and Bundles

There’s no official consensus on what word count defines the difference between a short story and a novella, or a novella and a novel. General consensus varies somewhat between genres. A short story in sci-fi, for example, might be a novella in historical romance. Or vice versa.

Across my site and in the marketing of my books, I use set definitions based on a very general consensus in the romance community. Other writers and publishers may have different breakpoints.

Novel: Word count exceeds 40K. “Short” or “Light” novel is under 50K, “Long” novel is over 90K.
Novella: Word count between 12K and 40K. “Short” novella is under 12K-25K. “Long” novella is 25K-40K.
Short Story: Word count under 12K. “Micro” story is under 1K.

Packages

In addition, anthologies, collections, and bundles are terms that describe specific gatherings of work that can impact how long a specific paperback or ebook is. I’m including these definitions as they are often used interchangeably but they don’t quite mean the same thing.

Anthologies are packages of usually shorter works by many writers. In many cases, a theme editor pulls together disparate writers and stories under a concept, e.g. “The Holidays.” The theme editor sometimes does the messy work of getting permissions from dozens of copyright holders and may also act as the line editor.
Collections are packages of usually shorter works by a single or small group of writers. (Yes, there’s a little wiggle room here.) My Frosting on the Cake series are all collections of only my work. I consider the co-authored In Deep Waters books with Radclyffe to be “collections” as well.
Bundles are packages of any story length, by one or many authors. They sometimes represent a discount over the same material bought separately. They’re often in digital formats only, and a bundle of long novels could run into 400K words or more. Publishers (including independent ones) can decide to package almost anything into bundles.

You can use this grid to see which of my works – of whatever length and whatever packaging – fall into which categories. I don’t track anthologies on my site because, while they include my work, the end product is the labor of someone else, usually a theme editor.