The seven Harry Potter novels add up to 1,084,170 words, using the counts most often cited for each book. The first, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Sorcerer's Stone in the US), is 76,944 words. The longest, Order of the Phoenix, is 257,045. Read straight through at an average pace, the series takes about 70 hours.
The numbers are good trivia, and better as a yardstick for your own draft. Below are the counts for each book, then 26 famous novels from Dickens to Gillian Flynn, and what the spread says about how long a novel should be.
Harry Potter word count by book
| Book | Words | UK pages | Reading time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Book1. Philosopher's Stone (1997) | Words76,944 | UK pages223 | Reading timeAbout 5 hours |
| Book2. Chamber of Secrets (1998) | Words85,141 | UK pages251 | Reading timeAbout 5.5 hours |
| Book3. Prisoner of Azkaban (1999) | Words107,253 | UK pages317 | Reading timeAbout 7 hours |
| Book4. Goblet of Fire (2000) | Words190,637 | UK pages636 | Reading timeAbout 12 hours |
| Book5. Order of the Phoenix (2003) | Words257,045 | UK pages766 | Reading timeAbout 16.5 hours |
| Book6. Half-Blood Prince (2005) | Words168,923 | UK pages607 | Reading timeAbout 11 hours |
| Book7. Deathly Hallows (2007) | Words198,227 | UK pages607 | Reading timeAbout 12.5 hours |
| BookSeries total | Words1,084,170 | UK pages3,407 | Reading timeAbout 70 hours |
Page counts are a poor measure of length, and this series shows why. Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows both run to 607 pages in their UK first editions, yet Deathly Hallows holds about 29,000 more words: roughly 327 words a page against 278. The US editions from Scholastic are longer again. Sorcerer's Stone fills 309 pages against the UK's 223, and Order of the Phoenix 870 against 766. Typeface, spacing and trim size decide the pages. The words stay put.
The series tripled in length
The first three books grow gently, by 11 percent and then 26 percent. Then Goblet of Fire arrives at 190,637 words, 78 percent longer than Prisoner of Azkaban. Rowling has said she knew from the start it would be the biggest of the first four. Order of the Phoenix adds another 35 percent, and on its own it nearly matches the first three books combined: 257,045 words against 269,338. Half-Blood Prince is the only book that shrinks, by a third, before Deathly Hallows climbs back to 198,227.
Put another way, books four to seven hold three quarters of the series. A reader who has finished Prisoner of Azkaban has read a quarter of Harry Potter.
The timing matters. The first book was a debut by an unknown author. Bloomsbury paid a £2,500 advance and printed 500 hardbacks in June 1997. Three years later Goblet of Fire became the first book in the series released on the same day in Britain and the US. A long book from an author with millions of readers is a different proposition from a long first novel.
Length is something a debut has to justify and a bestseller gets to spend.
Word counts of famous books
The table runs from shortest to longest. Public-domain classics are counted from the Standard Ebooks editions, which publish a word count for every book. Modern titles use the figures most often cited by publishing sites such as Reedsy. Everything is rounded to the nearest thousand, because no two editions agree to the word: many lists give The Great Gatsby as 47,094 words, while the Standard Ebooks edition counts 48,465.
| Book | Genre | Words |
|---|---|---|
| BookDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson (1886) | GenreHorror | Words26,000 |
| BookAlice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (1865) | GenreChildren's | Words27,000 |
| BookA Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens (1843) | GenreClassic | Words29,000 |
| BookAnimal Farm, George Orwell (1945) | GenreSatire | Words30,000 |
| BookThe Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis (1950) | GenreChildren's fantasy | Words36,000–38,000 |
| BookFahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (1953) | GenreScience fiction | Words46,000 |
| BookThe Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) | GenreLiterary | Words47,000–48,500 |
| BookMrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (1925) | GenreLiterary | Words64,000 |
| BookThe Fault in Our Stars, John Green (2012) | GenreYoung adult | Words66,000 |
| BookThe Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson (1959) | GenreHorror | Words67,000 |
| BookFrankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818) | GenreHorror | Words78,000 |
| BookThe Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins (2008) | GenreYoung adult | Words100,000 |
| BookThe Martian, Andy Weir (2011) | GenreScience fiction | Words105,000 |
| BookThe Golden Compass, Philip Pullman (1995) | GenreFantasy | Words113,000 |
| BookWuthering Heights, Emily Brontë (1847) | GenreClassic | Words116,000 |
| BookTwilight, Stephenie Meyer (2005) | GenreYoung adult | Words119,000 |
| BookPride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (1813) | GenreRomance | Words122,000 |
| BookGone Girl, Gillian Flynn (2012) | GenreThriller | Words146,000 |
| BookDracula, Bram Stoker (1897) | GenreHorror | Words161,000 |
| BookLittle Women, Louisa May Alcott (1868–69) | GenreClassic | Words186,000 |
| BookJane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë (1847) | GenreClassic | Words187,000 |
| BookThe Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien (1954) | GenreFantasy | Words188,000 |
| BookMoby-Dick, Herman Melville (1851) | GenreClassic | Words211,000 |
| BookUlysses, James Joyce (1922) | GenreModernist | Words264,000 |
| BookA Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin (1996) | GenreFantasy | Words293,000 |
| BookWar and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (1869) | GenreClassic | Words564,000 |
Set the Harry Potter books against this list and they spread across most of it. Philosopher's Stone sits beside Frankenstein. Order of the Phoenix is longer than Moby-Dick and about 7,000 words short of Ulysses. The whole series is nearly twice War and Peace in English.
What the famous books tell you
Short books last. The first five rows fall under 40,000 words, the line the Nebula and Hugo awards draw for a novel. By that measure Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, A Christmas Carol and Animal Farm are novellas, and The Great Gatsby clears the line by less than 9,000 words. Length is not what made any of them last.
The middle is where debuts live. Seven of the 26 books sit between 78,000 and 122,000 words, from Frankenstein to Pride and Prejudice. That is close to the range agents ask of a first novel today: 70,000 to 100,000 for most adult fiction, up to about 120,000 for fantasy and science fiction.
The long end is old or epic. Above 140,000 words the list is mostly nineteenth-century classics and epic fantasy, with Gone Girl and Ulysses as the exceptions. Fantasy is the one shelf where readers expect a thick book. Elsewhere, a length like that is usually a classic's privilege or an established author's.
Debuts and the famous outliers
Philosopher's Stone, at 76,944 words, sits inside today's range for an adult debut, and above the 20,000 to 55,000 words agents now expect of middle grade. It was a debut that fit, more or less. The books that broke every range came after the readers did.
Twilight is the famous counterexample, and its story shows how unusual it was. Stephenie Meyer queried agents with a manuscript of 130,000 words. Of her 15 letters, nine were rejected and five went unanswered. The one yes came from an assistant at Writers House who, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2010, did not realize young adult novels then ran about 40,000 to 60,000 words. The book reached the agent Jodi Reamer, sold at auction and came out in 2005 at about 119,000 words. A long debut got out of the slush pile because one reader did not know the rule.
Most of the other long books in the table came after their authors had readers. Gone Girl, long for a thriller at about 146,000 words, was Gillian Flynn's third novel. The Fellowship of the Ring followed The Hobbit by seventeen years. The Martian is a debut, but at about 105,000 words it sits inside the science fiction range, and it reached Crown only after Andy Weir had serialized it on his blog and sold it on Kindle for 99 cents.
Using famous books as a yardstick
Compare like with like. An agent reading your query sets your length against your comp titles: recent books in your genre, ideally debuts. The fifth book of a bestselling series tells you little about what a first novel can be. If you want a Harry Potter benchmark, use the first book.
Count words, not pages, and convert to time when you want a feel for the reader's side. At 260 words a minute, a 90,000-word novel takes under six hours, a little longer than Chamber of Secrets. The piece on average reading speed covers where that figure comes from. If you are planning a series, let the first book fit the range and keep a series bible so later books can grow without losing track of what came before.
Cutting toward a target is easier when nothing you cut is lost. In Strokes a book can be a project folder with one document per chapter, and version history keeps earlier drafts, so a 20,000-word trim can be undone a chapter at a time.
For the ranges by genre, with the numbers agents publish, read how many words is a novel. For the far end of the scale, past War and Peace, see the longest book ever written.
