I've written eight novels that I'm working on getting published at the moment, and some of them are quite long so I looked at what the average size of a book is. It's different for every genre, of course, but as mine are sci-fi/fantasy, the word count limit is 200,000 words, 250,000 if you're famous and know the book will sell despite its daunting size. Unfortunately, by the time I thought to look that up, I had already written three 300,000 word books, so now I have to work on cutting them down. My newer books, I've kept down to 180-185,000.
Of L&C stories, the longest is 'And Then There Was Light,' which is just under 143,000 words--244 Microsoft Word pages single-spaced.
Of course, as a reader first and then a writer, I think the most important thing is to follow the story--don't make a short story 250,000 words and don't try to fit a long story into 10,000 words because it's just making things hard on yourself!
I will say that if I had known at the start that my first books (all in a series) would be that long, I would have been too intimidated to start. Conversely, when I first started writing L&C fiction, I was petrified by the thought of writing something so short...until I realized just how easy it can be.
