How Many Chapters in a Novel?

The short answer

Take your target word count and divide it by the chapter length your genre uses. That is the whole calculation, and the two tables below give you both inputs.

The count is worth having because it is a work plan. Forty chapters at 2,500 words is forty sittings, and knowing that is what gets a novel finished rather than started. Start the first chapter now.

Chapters by genre

These are the bands trade publishers, agents and submission guidelines quote for a debut novel, and they are the bands the chapter length calculator runs on, so the page and the tool never disagree. They are a starting point, not a rule.

Two of the rows are worth reading twice. Thrillers have the most chapters of anything on the list, because short chapters produce the sensation of speed and a thriller is largely in the business of producing that sensation. Literary novels have the fewest, and the longest, because their chapters are usually built around a movement of thought rather than around an event.

Find your row and take the chapter length off it. DreamPress writes to that length and holds your cast, your places and your rules in a story bible with a running memory, so a fact written into chapter two is still right in chapter forty, on the free plan and on Pro alike. Start a novel in your genre.

Chapters by total word count

If you already know how long the book will be, this is the table you want. Chapter counts are rounded to the nearest whole chapter.

Read across a row rather than down a column. A 90,000-word novel is 23 chapters or 45 chapters depending on nothing but chapter length, and both are completely normal books.

Pick the row that matches your book and the column that matches your genre's chapter length. Those two numbers are everything DreamPress needs to start. Turn those two numbers into chapters.

Why the count varies

Pace. Short chapters read fast, partly because a chapter break is a natural place to keep going rather than to stop. This is why thrillers use them and why literary fiction mostly does not.

Point of view. If you change viewpoint at chapter breaks, the number of chapters is set by how often you need to change heads. A four-narrator novel will usually have more chapters than a single-narrator one of the same length.

Scene breaks are not chapters. A chapter can hold three scenes separated by white space. Writers who count every scene as a chapter end up with ninety of them and a book that feels choppy without being fast.

Parts on top of chapters. Some books group their chapters into two or three named parts. This does not change the chapter count, but a book in four parts of eight chapters reads very differently from a flat run of thirty-two, and a part break is a much stronger signal to the reader than a chapter break. Use parts when the book genuinely changes its situation, its place or its time.

Every one of these is a setting rather than a rule, and each is one you make before you generate: length, viewpoint, and how much happens in a chapter. Set yours and write.

Where to put the break

Counting chapters is arithmetic. Deciding where one ends is the craft decision, and it is the one that decides whether a reader keeps going.

End on a change rather than on a conclusion. A chapter that finishes with the character having resolved something gives the reader a natural place to stop. A chapter that finishes one line after something has changed, and before the character has responded to it, does not. This is why so much commercial fiction ends chapters mid-decision.

Not every chapter needs a cliffhanger. A book made entirely of cliffhangers tires the reader by chapter twelve, because they stop believing any of them. Alternate: end two or three chapters on a turn, then end one on a quiet beat that lets the reader catch up.

Start late, too. The commonest fixable problem in a first draft is the chapter opening, which usually begins about two pages before anything happens. Cut the first two paragraphs of every chapter and most drafts improve.

Write the chapter, then move the break. A DreamPress chapter is editable text you can cut, reorder and regenerate. Write the next chapter now.

Chapter count for a serial

If you are publishing as you write, the chapter is a delivery unit as well as a structural one, and two things change.

Chapters get shorter. Something between 1,500 and 2,500 words is the usual landing place, because a reader on a phone in the evening wants a complete unit, and because you have to be able to finish one in a sitting. That pushes the count up: an 85,000-word serial at 2,000 words a chapter is about 42 instalments.

Every chapter needs its own ending. In a book, chapter nineteen can end mid-thought because chapter twenty is on the next page. In a serial it has to hold somebody for a week.

Here is the arithmetic for a 40-chapter serial at three different rates.

Pick the rate you can hold in a bad week rather than a good one. A serial that pauses loses more readers than a serial that was always slower.

Now the cost of holding that rate. A chapter costs 1 to 3 credits and 15 free credits arrive every day, so one evening's instalment takes a fifth to a third of a day's allowance. Thirty evenings is 450 free credits; the whole 40-chapter serial at the top price is 120. Verifying your email address adds 50, and seven nights in a row raises the daily allowance to 20. The free plan is sized for exactly this. Start tonight's instalment.

Do chapters have to be the same length?

No, and the good ones are not. Variation is one of the few pacing tools that works on a reader who is not paying attention.

The pattern that holds up best is ordinary chapters with occasional short ones. A 900-word chapter after four 3,500-word chapters reads as an alarm going off. The reverse, one very long chapter among short ones, tends to read as an error rather than as emphasis.

What does need to be consistent is the kind of thing a chapter is. If chapters one to ten each cover a single scene and chapter eleven covers three months, the reader will feel the change and not know why.

Once you know your count, decide what each chapter does. How to outline a novel covers that, and the free novel outline template gives you a row per chapter. Then hand the rows over: DreamPress turns one row into one chapter, puts a picture in it for 3 credits on any plan, Pro included, and narrates it as it writes. Begin the book.