Turn a scary target like 80,000 words into a number you can hit before breakfast. Set your deadline and how many days a week you actually write, get your daily quota, then log each session and watch the streak grid fill in.
Streak log: August 2026
Log what you wrote today. A filled square means you hit the daily quota, a hollow square means you logged words but fell short. Saved only in this browser.
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The planner counts the calendar days from today through your deadline, converts them into writing sessions at your chosen days per week (full weeks contribute that many sessions, the final partial week contributes at most its remaining days), then divides the words you still owe by those sessions and rounds up. The finish-date projection works the other way: tell it what you can realistically write per session and it walks the calendar forward to the day you would type the last word.
The streak grid borrows the habit-tracker trick: a filled square is a day you hit quota, and a chain of filled squares quickly becomes something you do not want to break. Miss a day? The quota recalculates from what is left, so the plan bends instead of snapping.
| Form | Typical range | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Flash fiction | 1,000 words or fewer | Complete in a single scene or moment. |
| Short story | 1,001 to 7,999 words | Longer than flash, short of a novelette. |
| Novelette | 8,000 to 17,000 words | A step up from a short story. |
| Novella | 20,000 to 50,000 words | A NaNoWriMo draft lands at the top of this band. |
| Novel | over 60,000 words | Most published novels run 80,000 to 120,000. |
Ranges are guidelines, not strict rules, and the borderlines blur. For the full breakdown, use our Novella or Novel? classifier.
Industry-standard word-count ranges by genre, format, and reader age group, a useful sanity check once your target is set. Full reference: Average Length of a Book.
| Book type | Typical length |
|---|---|
| Adult Novels | 50,000 to 110,000 words |
| Flash Fiction Stories | 300 to 1,500 words |
| Short Story | 1,500 to 30,000 words |
| Novellas | 30,000 to 50,000 words |
| Romance Novels | 40,000 to 100,000 words |
| Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels | 90,000 to 120,000 words |
| Historical Fiction | 80,000 to 100,000 words |
| Horror, Mystery, Crime and Thriller Novels | 70,000 to 90,000 words |
| Young Adult Books | 50,000 to 80,000 words |
| Picture Books | 300 to 800 words |
| Early Reader Books | 200 to 3,500 words |
| Early Chapter Books | 4,000 to 10,000 words |
| Middle-Grade Fiction Books | 25,000 to 40,000 words |
| Standard Non-Fiction Work | 70,000 to 80,000 words |
| Memoir Books | 80,000 to 200,000 words |
| Biographies | 80,000 to 200,000 words |
| Self-Help Books | 40,000 to 50,000 words |
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