How many words in a BIONICLE book (roughly)

[Jam Pot Studios]

As part of writing my own novel in the last few months, I did some research into how long the first book in a children's novel series tends to be. It's recommended to new authors that they aim for roughly 70,000 to 80,000 words.

 

However, as I'm sure you can tell, a BIONICLE book is nothing like that length. I've done a whole bunch of Google searches but can't seem to find the length of a BIONICLE book, and I'm really eager to find out. If anyone has these stats to hand or lying about somewhere, I'd be really interested to know roughly how long one of the books is. I'm talking about Chronicles, Adventures and Legends here. Any of the books in those three series will do fine, or if you think you can accurately estimate how long one is, that'll do fine too.

 

Many thanks,

 

-Jam Pot

[Kopekemaster]

(I find that estimate to be rather high, seeing that a 200 page [regular, not child's] book with single-spaced regular-small print has about 50,000 words (I've written one, trust me), which would place the page count on a child's book (assuming the text is bigger and either 1.5 or 2 point spacing) around 350-400 pages.)

Anyway, I would estimate them to range from around 12,000 to 20,000 words. They have a font size of around 14 or 15, 1.5 spacing (I think), and usually around 100-150 pages.

EDIT: I just went up and looked at my collection and realized that they all lie around 130 pages in length, so I would guess around 15 or 16 thousand words.

Edited April 1, 2014 by Master of all Kopekes

[fishers64]

I think the 70,000 - 80,000 word count to be a bit high as well. Perhaps you're confusing it with an adult novel? I don't remember the exact number, but my novel draft, aimed at a teenage audience, only has 30 chapters of approx. 1,000 words apiece, which is 30,000, and I remember that to be acceptable.

 

*grabs random Bionicle book off the shelf* *turns to random page* *counts words*

 

155 words x 130 pages = 20,150 words by approximation. So probably around the 20,000 word mark. Might be less because of chapter break pages, so 16,000 - 19,000 might be in the more acceptable ballpark.

[JAG18]

I checked the old Greg quotes, and he mentioned off-hand that the standard Bionicle book is about 20,000 words.

[Pomegranate]

I pulled out three Bionicle books, one from Chronicles, one from Adventures, and one from Legends (just in case they got longer as the years went on, I guess?), and took 5 random pages from each when counting words for an average, and I made sure to get a short page in there to account for the short pages at the beginning and end of each chapter.

The three final wordcount estimates came out to ~21,000, ~22,400, and ~19,000, so I guess that sounds like the range you should shoot for

Edited April 1, 2014 by Pomegranate

[Jam Pot Studios]

I think the 70,000 - 80,000 word count to be a bit high as well. Perhaps you're confusing it with an adult novel? I don't remember the exact number, but my novel draft, aimed at a teenage audience, only has 30 chapters of approx. 1,000 words apiece, which is 30,000, and I remember that to be acceptable.

 

I checked it out and the first Harry Potter and Percy Jackson books were both roughly 70,000, while the first Skulduggery Pleasant was about 87,000. Plus, the Children's Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2014 had one section about length for the pre-teen/teen demographic, and it said roughly 70,000 to 80,000 words. As far as sources go, I'd trust the yearbook.

 

Thanks for the help, guys! I really appreciate that. It seems odd that they were only about 20,000 words as so much was crammed into them, but I guess that's the mark of a good author. Concise but powerful.

[Lyichir]

 

I think the 70,000 - 80,000 word count to be a bit high as well. Perhaps you're confusing it with an adult novel? I don't remember the exact number, but my novel draft, aimed at a teenage audience, only has 30 chapters of approx. 1,000 words apiece, which is 30,000, and I remember that to be acceptable.

 

I checked it out and the first Harry Potter and Percy Jackson books were both roughly 70,000, while the first Skulduggery Pleasant was about 87,000. Plus, the Children's Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2014 had one section about length for the pre-teen/teen demographic, and it said roughly 70,000 to 80,000 words. As far as sources go, I'd trust the yearbook.

 

Thanks for the help, guys! I really appreciate that. It seems odd that they were only about 20,000 words as so much was crammed into them, but I guess that's the mark of a good author. Concise but powerful.

 

Keep in mind as well that while series like Harry Potter and Percy Jackson had one book a year at best, there were typically three to six Bionicle books in any given year. So those 20,000 word books added up to a more respectable word count by the time the year was through.

[fishers64]

I'm still going to argue that Harry Potter is much longer than many books for that particular age range though.

[Jam Pot Studios]

I'm still going to argue that Harry Potter is much longer than many books for that particular age range though.

 

I don't doubt that it was, but it was a game-changer, and since then expectations have changed a bit. Bear in mind I'm not going for a really young audience. Tonally, my novel's leaning more towards Young Bond. I understand your concerns but I do know what I'm doing.

[fishers64]

 

I'm still going to argue that Harry Potter is much longer than many books for that particular age range though.

 

I don't doubt that it was, but it was a game-changer, and since then expectations have changed a bit. Bear in mind I'm not going for a really young audience. Tonally, my novel's leaning more towards Young Bond. I understand your concerns but I do know what I'm doing.

 

I'm not meaning to insult your writing skill. Whatever is best for your particular work. I'm also not as well informed on this subject as I would like; I need to do more research and get back to you.

[Aanchir]

Keep in mind that the BIONICLE books, as marketing materials for the sets, were intended to reach not just a wide age range but also people who might not normally be into reading. So that's part of the reason they tended to be relatively short.

 

Another factor is cost. The smaller a book is, the cheaper it is. Nowadays a LEGO chapter book is cheaper than most LEGO sets from the theme in question. And this helps make it an easier impulse purchase.

 

As Andrew points out, the LEGO Group could probably have released a single BIONICLE book each year that was more or less comparable in size and word count to tomes like Harry Potter, Eragon, The Lord of the Rings, or the like, and it would have had a similar average word count to a year's worth of smaller BIONICLE books. But that might have been a lot more intimidating for many less devoted readers than releasing smaller books comparable in length to Goosebumps and similar series. And as such, it might have resulted in worse sales figures overall.

[Jam Pot Studios]

Totally get that. The length of a BIONICLE book doesn't have any bearing on what I'm writing, I was just interested

 

Cost aside, I really prefer the structure of the BIONICLE book series': shorter, but more of them worked well. It was like watching a long-running TV show, waiting for the next part to come out, and did wonders for the tension, especially in the 2007 arc.

[Kopekemaster]

You might be missing some of the lower word count children's books. The Invention of Hugo Cabret was ~25,000 words, and was considered a novel.

[Lyichir]

You might be missing some of the lower word count children's books. The Invention of Hugo Cabret was ~25,000 words, and was considered a novel.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret was an interesting case because it was practically 50% illustrations. I got it at a book signing by the author, who explained that he had written a longer story but replaced passages with pages of illustrations in some parts to better represent the themes of early films (ironically making the book almost twice as thick). In any case, I would hesitate to use that as an example of a short children's novel because of the way it skirts the line between regular fiction (in which word count is the key measure of length) and graphic fiction (in which page count is a better measure of length). I certainly wouldn't put the Bionicle books in the same category—I loved them, but they were very much "chapter books" rather than "novels".

[Kopekemaster]

 

You might be missing some of the lower word count children's books. The Invention of Hugo Cabret was ~25,000 words, and was considered a novel.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret was an interesting case because it was practically 50% illustrations. I got it at a book signing by the author, who explained that he had written a longer story but replaced passages with pages of illustrations in some parts to better represent the themes of early films (ironically making the book almost twice as thick). In any case, I would hesitate to use that as an example of a short children's novel because of the way it skirts the line between regular fiction (in which word count is the key measure of length) and graphic fiction (in which page count is a better measure of length). I certainly wouldn't put the Bionicle books in the same category—I loved them, but they were very much "chapter books" rather than "novels".

 

The main reason I brought that up was to just show the extreme opposite side of the argument. And yeah, I think the total page count was around 550 or something crazy (for a kids book of that word count, I mean) like that.

[Jam Pot Studios]

Mine's not really children children, it's more teen/young adult. thanks for the tips though.

[DoctorW]

Super late to the party, but here  are my two cents. As someone who is trying to write a novel now, I can be informed about this. 

According to Greg, BIONICLE books seem to have an average of 20k words. This is supported by the official wordcount website which lists the first one in the 18k range. I think this makes sense given how Scholastic printed them fast and for children.

By most standards, the BIONICLE series would classify as "novellas", or smaller novels. By the standards of the Hugo Awards for science fiction texts, these are their criteria for written works: 

• <10,000 words is a Short Story
• 10,000-20,000 is a Novelette
• 20,000-40,000 is a Novella
• 40,000+ is a full novel

Of course, some definitions do go as high as 70k, but few people would dispute a 40k word novel, and even if it is in the 30k ballpark, the Hugos may fudge the definition. 

The official National Novel Writing Month challenge is for 50k words, and that is just the baseline. But 50k is about the average for young adult novels, even some adult novels like Fahrenheit 451 or The Great Gatsby are hovering around that range. 

In general, the novel should be long enough to tell the story, but short enough for your demographic. BIONICLE wrote their stories to be quick and easily digestible. But if you are writing for YA, you may want to go about twice as high. The entire BIONICLE wordcount for at least Legends may be the length of a full novel, but I have not checked. 

But I hope the novel you wrote turned out alright. I wonder what the final word count ended up being.