April 25, 2024 — Have you ever wondered how much effort it takes to produce an e-book in different book genres? The size of the book creation and production effort depends on many factors, of course. Examples include the complexity of the topic or story, the amount of research and fact-checking required, text-only vs. use of images, the expected level of quality and so on and so forth. One factor can be measured, though, and that is the average page length of a book. And this ebook page length differs significantly depending on the book genre.
eBook Page Length by Book Genre
It makes quite a difference whether you want to publish a children's picture book, a 50-recipe smoothie book, a Science Fiction novel or a technical encyclopedia. The graph shows the average length of the Top 100 bestsellers in each of the 30 main Amazon Kindle categories, measured in terms of the number of pages for a book in the respective category. (Read more)
How many pages should I write?
Does this mean you should write exactly the number of pages shown in the graph? - Certainly not. The numbers represent averages. eBook page length varies widely even within a genre. Yet, the numbers shown here give you some indication of how much the required page lengths differ between genres and what is roughly expected by the market.
How does Amazon Kindle measure ebook page length (page numbers)?
For an ebook that has a corresponding print edition, Amazon will display the real page numbers based on the print edition.
For an ebook that does not have a print edition, Amazon KDP states:
This corresponds to the following Kindle settings:
- Font size: smallest
- Typeface: condensed
- Line Spacing: small
- Words per Line: default
Estimates vary based on different Kindle devices available, but the above settings translate into approximately 250-300 words per page on average.
KENPC - Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count
With the introduction of the new royalty system for Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owners Lending Library (books for Amazon Prime), borrows are paid by the number of actual pages read by the reader. The measure that Amazon introduced back in July 2015 to determine the royalty levels for borrows is "Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count" or "KENPC".
During the introductory month of the new system, the conversion of KENPC into the actual number of words in the book (actual word count) showed significant differences from one book to the other. We saw huge fluctuations . The average across a sample of 50 books in August 2015 showed 172 words per Kindle Edition Normalized Page. This number was significantly different from the average we had seen for the "Estimated Print Length" that had been given in the product details of each book's Amazon sales page.
Today, even after the introduction of what Amazon calls version 2.0 of KENPC, the fluctuations and variations of the words per estimated page seem to persist.
You can see your book's KENPC listed on the "Promote and Advertise" page in your Bookshelf, and you can also see total pages read on your Sales Dashboard report. Amazon states: "Because it's based on default settings, KENPC may vary from page counts listed on your Amazon detail page, which are derived from other sources."
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