Introduction
Data nerd here who wishes all books posted their word count in addition to page numbers. It’s more consistent and doesn’t vary by font size, paper size, margins, etc. I know I’m not the first to dive into this, and I encourage you to check out the excellent work of several others! I’ve listed the ones I’m aware of below:
- Fantasy Word Counts: An Overhaul of many of the most popular series by u/CoachDave27
- Word Count of Popular Fantasy and Science Fiction Series vol. 2[OC] by u/appseto
- Word Count of popular Fantasy and Science Fiction Series by u/Temibrezel
I’ve also compiled the data I could find in a public Google Sheet, which you can find here: SFF Book Wordcounts
Sources
Word counts of books are notoriously hard to find. This data won’t be 100% accurate, but it will be as close as I could reasonably get. I’m always open to revising these charts if you can provide an accurate source showing different wordcounts.
With that in mind, this data was pulled primarily from the following sources:
- Fantasy Word Counts: An Overhaul of many of the most popular series by u/CoachDave27
- https://loopingworld.com/2009/03/06/wordcount/ by Abalieno
- https://www.arbookfind.com/
- https://howlongtoread.com/
- https://www.readinglength.com/
What’s New? Hasn’t This Been Done Before?
Fair question! I approached this with a few goals in mind:
- All SFF is fair game, not just fantasy.
- Books are grouped by world, not just series. For example, Stormlight Archive would fall under the Cosmere world.
- Webserials are included.
- An additional chart specifically showing the Top 25 series from r/Fantasy‘s very own 2023 Top Novel list
Longest SFF Series of All Time by Word Count
And now… the longest SFF series/worlds of all time! Note how many of these are currently unfinished and continuing to get even longer!
r/Fantasy Top 25 Novels (2023) by Word Count
Wowza! Such big numbers. I definitely didn’t know about some of them but am glad that some hard to dethrone. looks at the Wheel of Time series. Great list and cool blog! Will have to follow y’all for sure now. 🙂
Short story collections missed from the Shadows of the Apt numbers?
Spoils of War (2016), ISBN 978-1910935217
A Time for Grief (2017), ISBN 978-1910935217
For Love of Distant Shores (2018), ISBN 978-1910935712
The Scent of Tears (2018), ISBN 978-1910935712