Is 20,000 words (20 chapters/200 pages) enough for a novel?

People are going to spout guidelines for your question saying that 20,000 words is far too short for a novel. Ignore them completely. They have read an article and decided to believe it. Through the history of published works there have been successful short novels. They are not common but they have always been there and some have been hugely successful. Aeschylus and Homer started it. Still remembered after almost three thousand years.

In modern times “Call of the Wild”, Candide, The Social Contract, and then there was the pulp of the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties. Moorcock was rarely out of the bestsellers lists, The Tarzan Novels, John Carter and so on. Johnathan Livingstone Seagull. Arthur C Clarkes;, Rama, Asimov, Dick, Vonnegut and so many others that were under two hundred pages my hands would grow to tired to type them all. I lived through those years and read many of those books.

Yeah, I hear the critics say, ancient history and the others; thirty years ago. What about recently?

Does the last five years count? Well you have “Piranesi” by Susanna Clarke, Number one bestseller worldwide. The curious incident of the dog in the night-time. Number one bestseller worldwide, you get where I am going with this. I can keep going if anyone wishes me to.

A short novel or novella is rarely successful but some are, and it does not matter when it is released but the naysaying Ladies and Gentlemen have a point. As it is rare these days that a short novel succeeds.

But what literary lights are they that are so sure they are right when answering questions on Quora on a Monday night. Lol- were I as successful as they are I would be on my yacht in Monte Carlo tonight. Sadly I am just a reader and writer.

The river Girl's Torment. A novel by Raymond Walker