A question of words

Cactus and I were talking yesterday about how many words make a novel. I said that 50,000 equalled a novella and my first one is 73,000 odd but they can be as long as 125,000 words although those tend to be more fantasy/sci fi. From a reader's perspective 300 pages is about right and a publisher isn't going to take a gamble on a 1,000 page opus unless you are a proven writer. Of course if the story grabs you and doesn't let go you don't care how long the book is - a good example being Mark Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War - which I loved.