Word Count Questions

[RenaissanceWriter]

Hi everyone!
I'm very new to novel writing having been a journalist and then doing some web writing. What's the average I should expect for a novel? I have two that I've been working on although I've focused most of my attention on one of them. It's a pretty light-hearted contemporary fiction novel. The other is more of an intrigue story most closely related to a James Patterson novel. (God, I hope.) I sense that it will be longer as the reader will expect more detail, and the scenes will need more meat to them.

Am I wrong to assume a 100,000 words roughly? Don't laugh if that's way off. I'm not so sure how a page of text in Word translates in terms of novel pages. I have that number in the back of my head, and I'm not sure if it's because I've read it somewhere or because it's a nice, round number.:D

[DeadlyAccurate]

One-inch margins, Courier, 12 point, double-spaced. Multiply your pages by 250 to come up with your word count. So a 100,000-word novel is about 400 pages. I believe that for first novels, most publishers don't want you going much over that. 80-100K is a good size. Mysteries tend to be smaller, fantasy novels tend to be a little longer.

[Kasey Mackenzie]

*agrees with DA* That's a very good general estimate of what to shoot for. Also, if you know which particular publishing house you want to shoot for, take a look at their publishing guidelines. Often you can find these on their website. You can also hit a bookstore or library and flip through various books in the genre closest to yours to try and get an impression about what the average seems to be.