How Long Is a Novella? Word Count and Pages

Two sets of award rules define a novella by its word count. SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) sets these categories in the rules of its Nebula Awards, effective for the award year that began on January 1, 2026: a short story has fewer than 7,500 words, a novelette 7,500 to 17,499, a novella 17,500 to 39,999, and a novel 40,000 or more.

The Hugo Awards draw the same lines: their summary of the categories describes a novella as a story of between 17,500 and 40,000 words, and a novel as 40,000 words or more.

Both are award rules for science fiction and fantasy; for other genres, treat them as a useful yardstick rather than a rule. When you publish, KDP’s length rules are page counts, and they apply to print books. Its Guide to Kindle Content Quality also lists “content that is too short” as disappointing content, without giving a number. The label is for readers: calling a 30,000-word story a novella in the description sets the right expectation.

Pages are estimates at about 265 words per page, before front and back matter; your layout can move them by around 12% either way.

Page count depends on trim size, font, line spacing and margins, so any figure is an estimate. Our free word-to-page calculator uses typical figures of about 265 words on a 5″ × 8″ page and 310 on a 6″ × 9″ page. On those numbers, a 17,500-word novella comes to about 67 pages at 5″ × 8″ (57 at 6″ × 9″), and a 39,999-word one to about 151 (130 at 6″ × 9″).

Those numbers matter because KDP sets its print rules in pages:

• Paperback: KDP’s Print Options table starts at 24 pages for black ink (72 for standard color). Every novella clears it.
• Spine text: according to KDP’s paperback cover guide, a book needs at least 79 pages to carry text on the spine, or 80 if you make the cover in Cover Creator. Below that, a cover with spine text is rejected. At 5″ × 8″ the line falls around 21,000 words; at 6″ × 9″, around 24,500. The KDP cover calculator gives the spine width and full cover size for your page count.
• Hardcover: 75 to 550 pages. The smallest hardcover size in KDP’s table is 5.5″ × 8.5″, where 75 pages is about 22,000 words by the same estimate.

So a short novella makes a slim paperback with a blank spine, and only a longer one can also be a hardcover.

KDP pays ebooks one of two royalty rates, and the price decides which one you can use. On Amazon.com, according to KDP’s eBook Royalties and list price requirements:

• 35% plan: 35% of the list price, at any price from $0.99 (for files under 3 MB) to $200.
• 70% plan: 70% of the list price after a delivery cost, which the Digital Book Pricing Page sets at $0.15 per MB. It is available only at $2.99 to $12.99, and only for buyers in the countries KDP lists for it. KDP raised the top of that band from $9.99 on July 7, 2026.

Here is what a novella with a 1 MB file earns per sale on Amazon.com, for a buyer who pays no VAT, worked out with the same royalty math as our KDP royalty calculator:

The step at $2.99 is what matters. One cent below it, a sale pays $1.04 at most; at $2.99 on the 70% plan it pays $1.99. Before you publish, the eBook Pricing tab in KDP shows the estimated royalty for each plan at the price you enter.

Which price is right depends on the novella’s job. To earn on its own, it needs $2.99 or more for the 70% plan. To bring readers to your other books, a lower price gives up royalty per copy, and the payoff comes from the books they buy next.

If you plan to advertise it, the price also sets how much a click can cost you. A $0.99 sale leaves $0.35, a break-even ACOS of about 35%; at $2.99 on the 70% plan it is about 67%. Our guide to ACOS explains the math.

On Amazon.com a paperback earns 60% of a list price of $9.99 or more, or 50% at $9.98 and below, minus the printing cost, according to KDP’s Paperback Royalty page. The printing cost of a black-ink paperback with 24 to 110 pages is a flat $2.30 in a regular trim size, so a short novella costs as much to print as a 110-page book.

Take a 25,000-word novella, about 95 pages at 5″ × 8″:

• At $8.99: 0.50 × $8.99 − $2.30 = $2.20 a copy.
• At $9.99: 0.60 × $9.99 − $2.30 = $3.69 a copy.

One dollar on the price adds $1.49 to every copy. KDP also sets a minimum list price so that the royalty covers printing: $2.30 ÷ 0.50 = $4.60 for this book. The KDP printing cost calculator works out both for your own page count, trim size and store.

A hardcover of the same story, about 87 pages at 5.5″ × 8.5″, clears the 75-page minimum. Black-ink hardcovers of 75 to 108 pages cost $6.80 to print on Amazon.com, and the hardcover rates match the paperback ones, so at $14.99 the royalty would be 0.60 × $14.99 − $6.80 = $2.19.

KDP Select is a 90-day program for Kindle ebooks. Enrolling puts the ebook in Kindle+, the reader subscription called Kindle Unlimited until October 2026, which lets subscribers read as many books as they want. On top of the royalty from copies you sell, Kindle+ reads are paid from the KDP Select Global Fund, by the page.

Pay per page changes the math for a short book. KDP pays for the first time a subscriber reads a given page, and measures pages in KENP, a page count it calculates with standard formatting settings. The rate per page is the month’s fund for a marketplace divided by all KENP read there, and KDP announces the fund near the 15th of the following month. Because pay is per page, a subscriber who finishes a short book earns you fewer pages than one who finishes a long book. Our KENP guide explains the fund, and the KENP calculator turns a page count into money at a rate you choose.

KDP Select also gives a novella:

• Free Book Promotions: the ebook free for up to 5 days in each 90-day period, with no royalty on those days.
• Kindle Countdown Deals: time-limited discounts on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk for books enrolled at least 30 days and listed at $2.99 to $24.99 on Amazon.com. A $0.99 novella can’t use them, and each period allows one type of promotion, not both.

The price is exclusivity. During the 90-day enrollment, the ebook can only be distributed through KDP and public libraries, and KDP’s Select page says that rules out your own website and blogs too. Print editions can still be sold anywhere.

A novella can sit next to a series as a prequel, a side story or a bridge between two books, and KDP’s series tools have a place for it. A book in a series is either main content, which you put in reading order, or related content. KDP’s series page help gives prequels, novellas and box sets as examples of related content, which appears in the order you added it, on Amazon.com desktop and mobile browsers but not in Amazon apps or devices. You can switch a title between main and related content later.

Make the novella main content when readers need it to follow the story, and related content when it is an optional extra that shouldn’t change the book numbers readers already know.

Several novellas can also become one book. KDP’s quality guide asks a book with several stories to say so in its title and on its cover, with words such as “Collection”, “Compilation” or “Series”, to list every story in its details, and not to reuse the same content across books excessively.

The series calculator shows what a reader who starts your series is worth, from the royalty per book and the share of readers who go on to the next one. That is also the most you can spend to win such a reader, through ads or through a cheap or free novella that leads into book one.

A reader magnet is a book you give away in return for joining your mailing list, and a complete novella suits the job. KDP’s rules shape how you run it:

• Keep it out of KDP Select. If you send the ebook to subscribers yourself, it can’t be enrolled, because Select requires the digital edition to be exclusive to KDP, websites included.
• Free on Amazon is not a setting. KDP doesn’t allow a free list price; the lowest on Amazon.com is $0.99 for a file under 3 MB. The Digital Book Pricing Page adds that if a book is free in another store, Amazon may make it free too, and you earn no royalty while it is. “May” is not a promise.
• Put the offer after the story. KDP’s quality guide lists bonus content placed before a book’s main content, and content whose main purpose is to advertise, among the disappointing content it doesn’t allow.
• Reward sign-ups, not reading. KDP doesn’t allow marketing that rewards Kindle+ subscribers for reading your books, and it names bonus content as one such reward. Offer the novella for joining your list, never for borrowing or finishing a book.

Our guide on how to market a self-published book covers the mailing list and the other ways to reach readers.

1. Finish and edit the story, then note its word count: it tells you which formats are possible.
2. Format the ebook and the print interior; the page count decides whether a hardcover is possible too. KDP’s free Kindle Previewer shows how the ebook looks on tablets, Kindle E-readers and phones.
3. Make the covers. A paperback cover is one PDF with the back, spine and front, sized by the page count. Leave the spine blank under 79 pages.
4. Set up the title in KDP: title, description, keywords and categories, then add it to its series if it belongs to one.
5. Choose the price and royalty plan, and decide on KDP Select before you publish.
6. Publish. KDP’s Timelines page gives up to 72 hours for a new ebook or paperback detail page on Amazon.com, or up to 6 days for a print book from an account that hasn’t published before. KDP links the editions 48 hours to a week after each one is live.

Our guide to self-publishing a book on Amazon covers each step in more detail.

In Kindle+, much of what a novella earns can arrive as page reads, and KDP finalizes those near the 15th of the following month. If its job is to sell your other books, its own royalty is the smaller part of the picture.

A spreadsheet works: royalty and page reads per book from your KDP report, ad spend per book from Amazon Ads, month by month. Our guide to KDP reports explains which report to use. SelfPub Go does the same job in a desktop app. Its royalty analytics reads the KDP report you already download and shows royalties and Kindle+ page reads per book next to your Amazon Ads spend, and in its ad results, pages read after a click count toward the ad’s profit.

Rules and numbers here come from the linked KDP Help, SFWA and Hugo Awards pages as of the date at the top, using Amazon.com prices. If a linked page now says otherwise, trust the linked page.