Your manuscript is 38,000 words
A short manuscript is almost never a book with too few events. It is usually a book with the right events, summarised instead of dramatised — scenes reported in a paragraph that should have been written. The fix is not adding plot. It is going back and writing what is already there properly.
Where the missing words usually are
Work through in order. Every item adds words that belong to the book, which is the difference between expanding and padding.
- Find every important moment you summarised in a paragraph. Write it as a scene.
- Find every scene that starts after the interesting part. Start earlier.
- Find your secondary characters. Do they want anything? Give them one thing.
- Find the interiority gaps: moments where a character reacts and we are not told how.
- Find the place. Most short drafts are set nowhere in particular.
- Find the time skips. What happened in the six months you jumped over?
- Find the arguments that are resolved in three lines. They are usually the book.
- Find the ending. Short manuscripts very often end two scenes early.
- Check the beginning. Sometimes it starts too late rather than too early.
- Ask whether it is a novella. Some are, and that is a form, not a failure.
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Summary versus scene
This is the diagnosis nearly every short manuscript needs.
They argued about the house for weeks and eventually she moved out. That is a paragraph. Written as a scene — the actual argument, in a room, with the specific words said and not said — it is 2,000 words, and it is the part the reader came for.
Go through the manuscript and mark every important moment that is reported rather than shown. Ten of those, written properly, is 20,000 words that belong to the book.
This is also why short drafts feel oddly flat despite having plenty of events: the reader is being told the story rather than being in it.
What not to do
Do not add subplots to reach a number. Padding is visible and it slows the book.
Do not describe more. Description added to hit a word count reads exactly as what it is.
Do not add characters. A thin book with more people in it is a thinner book.
Do not stretch the sentences. It is the most immediately detectable form of padding and it damages the prose.
Add what is missing, not what is absent.
Or accept the form it is
Some books are short because they are novellas, and the novella is a real form with real readers — particularly in literary fiction, science fiction, horror and memoir.
20,000–50,000 words. Traditionally difficult to sell to publishers; entirely viable self-published, and a good fit for digital and audio.
If the book is complete at 38,000 words and every scene is written properly, it may simply be a novella. That is a decision worth making deliberately rather than padding your way out of.
About Your Book Pro
Your Book Pro is a book-writing platform built in Britain. Start with an idea, notes, half a draft, a podcast, or a finished manuscript, and use our purpose-built AI tools for planning, feedback, editing, proofreading, cover designs, and to create print-ready files. Writing is totally free: you can type, upload or speak your book as much as you like, and use only the editing tools you need with Plus, or go unlimited with Pro.
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Every account starts with 1,000 welcome credits, and a plain export of your own words is free.
Detailed Editorial Feedback reads the whole manuscript and flags where you have summarised what should be dramatised, which strands are underdeveloped, and where the reader is being told rather than shown. That is precisely the diagnosis a short draft needs, and it costs 900 credits for a 60,000-word book — inside your free welcome credits.
Plan Feedback helps if the structure itself is thin rather than the execution. Beta Reader tells you where readers wanted more, which is often not where you assumed.
And if you would rather talk the missing scenes than type them, you can: record them, run Transcription, and edit from there. A great many people find the emotionally difficult scenes — the argument, the leaving, the illness — far easier said aloud than typed.
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- What's the minimum word count for a novel?
- Around 60,000 for most adult genres, 70,000 for literary fiction. Below 50,000 it is generally classed as a novella.
- Can I publish a 40,000-word book?
- Self-published, yes, and novellas sell well in some genres and in audio. Traditionally it is harder, though not impossible in literary fiction.
- How do I add words without padding?
- Write the scenes you summarised. That is nearly always where the missing words are, and they are words the book actually wanted.
- Is a short first draft a bad sign?
- No. Plenty of writers draft thin and expand in revision — it is a temperament, not a fault, and it is easier to fix than the opposite.