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
Update to 2025?
Yes an update would be appreciated.
I wonder if the Duncton Series by William Horwood should be in the top 25. I can’t find a word count online, but I would estimate the six books are about 1.5 million in total.
what about :
NEON series by Vuk Stribog is a dark, rich, and wonderfully original fantasy saga, full of danger, sorrow, loyalty, and strange beauty. Across the books, the world of Neon feels alive with ruined splendour, court intrigue, low-city misery, and unforgettable animal characters. NEON: Silent Paws and NEON: The Black Feather — The Menagerie, the Gallows, and the Marked especially show the series at its strongest, blending tragedy, mystery, and fierce emotion. This is a bold and imaginative work for readers who love epic storytelling with heart, atmosphere, and claws.
The Great Nexus and the Shattered Clock by Vuk Stribog is not just a fantasy series — it is a whole cat-world built with astonishing size, strangeness, humour, darkness, and imagination. Across twelve books, each reaching around 180,000 words, the saga grows into more than two million words of story, following the kingdom of Neon from snowy village beginnings into a vast cosmic struggle of broken powers, ancient gods, beasts, machines, demons, blueprints, shards, and shattered time.
What begins with a poor family and a mysterious blue kitten slowly expands into a world of circus beasts, ruined courts, Low Paris alleys, guild secrets, living machines, forbidden inventions, and the terrible consequences of the broken Great Nexus and the damaged Tik-Tok Clock. The series mixes tragedy and comedy in a unique way: one moment there are starving kittens, corrupt kings, demon marks, and mechanical Sentinels; the next there is Leonardo arguing with a flying eel, Lord Nibblewick the rat causing chaos, the Duchess moon-fish sulking in her tank, or Madam Crumbolina somehow turning terror into comedy with her crystal paw.
The machinery and shard-craft become one of the most fascinating parts of the saga. Blueprints, beast crystals, guild masters, mind handlers, blue blood, crawling Sentinel parts, Tik-Tok commands, and the terrifying Patch Hunter Sentinel give the world a strange mechanical mythology of its own. The machines are not just devices; they are temptations, weapons, mysteries, and sometimes monsters. At the same time, Neon remains full of beasts, old legends, village gossip, strange nature, broken magic, and emotional characters who make the world feel alive.
Madam Crumbolina, the Tik-Tok Sentinel, Leonardo’s inventions, the flying eel, Lord Nibblewick, the Duchess, Mer-mer, Basti, Little Crow, Quickpaw, Mother Saffron, and so many others turn this series into something wild, funny, heartbreaking, and completely original. It feels like a dark fairy tale, a political saga, a machine fantasy, a beast legend, and a cosmic mystery all woven together.
For readers who love huge worlds, long sagas, strange mythology, emotional characters, and fantasy that becomes bigger with every book, The Great Nexus and the Shattered Clock is a massive and unforgettable journey through the broken, beautiful, dangerous world of Neon.
“In Neon, even wonder had teeth, and even machines remembered old nightmares.”