Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Hi,

Not a librarian here, just a user wanting clarification. According to the Librarian manual, 'Book-length fanfiction which is complete' is considered a valid book record. Given that Goodreads includes children's books like 'The Incredible Freedom Machine' by Kirli Saunders and Matt Ottley, which is 156 words long, and graphic novels like 'The Arrival' by Shaun Tan, which has no words at all, what do you consider 'book length'?

Do you go by word count or page count? Would 1,000 words count? 2,000? 3,000? What is the cut off? And how many words counts as one page?

I know the librarians are very busy, and don't want to waste their time with requests that can't be filled, so some clarification would be appreciated.

Adelaide wrote: "Hi,

Not a librarian here, just a user wanting clarification. According to the Librarian manual, 'Book-length fanfiction which is complete' is considered a valid book record. Given that Goodreads includes children's books like 'The Incredible Freedom Machine' by Kirli Saunders and Matt Ottley, which is 156 words long, and graphic novels like 'The Arrival' by Shaun Tan, which has no words at all, what do you consider 'book length'?

Do you go by word count or page count? Would 1,000 words count? 2,000? 3,000? What is the cut off? And how many words counts as one page?

I know the librarians are very busy, and don't want to waste their time with requests that can't be filled, so some clarification would be appreciated..."

Hi, I am not a Goodreads Librarian but read a lot of Fanfiction and am very interested in getting answers about this question as well since I have had several requests dismissed due to length last year when I first discovered requests could be made. A Goodreads Librarian who did several of my requests was trying to get clarification but since then all their responses to my requests have disappeared however here is some of the information gathered and hopefully this thread will get the conversation going again.

Link to Previous Discussion with this Question: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

My Information Contributed to Discussion:
I tried looking up Book Length References and thought I would share some of what I found here.

Book Length References I Used to Question Length
https://www.fanfiction.net/community/... I found this community page of "Novel Length Harry Potter Fanfiction" on Fanfiction.net that seems to require that fanfiction be more than 40,000 words long and COMPLETE to qualify as Novel Length.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/344... According to this page on Archive of Our Own they are comparing fanfiction length to various novels to show how many fanfiction they have that are longer than novels starting with a book reference that is 38,000 Words long.

https://aaronmullins.com/2020/12/08/a... Reference # 3: This site says "over 50,000 words can be considered a novel".

thewritelife.com/how-many-words-in-a-... Book Length Reference # 4: This site says "For most publishers, a book is “novel-length” when it’s between 50,000 and 110,000 words."

I've heard somewhere that a rule of thumb here is 40,000+/45,000+ words, or 130+ pages. There isn't a guideline yet, as there might be exceptions, such as Children's books.