Genre guide · Nonfiction
Travel Writing: word count & book length
How long a travel writing book should be, which trim sizes suit it and what that means in printed pages. Typical length: 60,000–90,000 words.
About travel writing
Narrative journeys that blend place, history and personal experience — distinct from guidebooks, which are reference books.
Printed length in recommended trim sizes
| Trim | Pages at 11 pt | Spine (white) |
|---|---|---|
| 6 x 9 in US Trade | 190–278 pages | 0.43–0.63 in |
| 5.5 x 8.5 in Digest | 214–324 pages | 0.48–0.73 in |
Page counts for these lengths
Tips for this category
- A route map on the endpapers or front matter is a reader favourite.
About Travel Writing
The genre of travel literature or travelogue encompasses outdoor literature, guide books, nature writing, and travel memoirs. Throughout history, many authors have contributed works to this genre through different forms of writing: poems, books, memoirs, biographies, novels, journals, online blogs, etc. Knowledge on key historic events, like slavery in the United States, have been expanded on through publishing and discoveries of personal travel accounts and literature. Authors native to a location or visiting from abroad make contributions to the local tourism through travel literature. Some travel literature is fictional adventures influenced by the author's personal experiences, while others, like guidebooks, only contain factual information about a given location.
From the Wikipedia article “Travel literature”, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Most-published travel writing works in Open Library
| Title | Author | First published | Editions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain | 1876 | 2,623 |
| Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog) | Jerome Klapka Jérôme | 1889 | 1,136 |
| King Solomon's Mines | H. Rider Haggard | 1876 | 1,105 |
| All's Well That Ends Well | William Shakespeare | 1734 | 818 |
| A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court | Mark Twain | 1889 | 789 |
| A Room with a View | E. M. Forster | 1905 | 755 |
| Metamorfosi | Ovid, William S. Anderson | 1474 | 747 |
| The Prisoner of Zenda | Anthony Hope, Gary Hoppenstand | 1800 | 627 |
| Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad | 1899 | 553 |
| Voyage Out | Virginia Woolf | 1915 | 465 |
Open Library lists 88,007 works under this subject.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a travel writing book be?
What trim size is best for travel writing?
Sources & data
- Subject statistics from Open Library.
- Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).