Novelette

A novelette is a work of narrative prose fiction longer than a short story but shorter than a novella; dictionaries define it similarly to novella, sometimes identically, sometimes disparagingly as trivial or sentimental. Exact edges come from award rules: the Nebula Awards, run by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, place the novelette at 7,500 to 17,499 words, between the short story below 7,500 and the novella at 17,500 to 40,000; the Hugo Award uses the same band, rounding the top to 17,500. Outside award schemes the edges soften: The Writer puts the form at approximately 7,000 to 20,000 words, anything shorter counting as a short story.

For the writer it is a targeting band, not a craft limit: submission windows, contest categories and serial bonus volumes are priced by these brackets, and the full ladder from flash fiction upward is mapped in how long is a novel.