Love With The Lights Off discussion

Word count is a big deal to an author and I for one have a hard time remembering what length is considered what type of story. For example, is a 10,000 word story considered a short story or a novella? Does it depend on genre?

I know stories less than 1000 words are called flash fiction.

According to Wikipedia, short stories are 1000-9000 words but some consider anything from 1000-20,000 words short stories. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_story

A novelette seems to fall right between at 10,000-17,500 for word count. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelette

Then there are novellas that can be from 17500-40000 words while some maintain that a novella can be anywhere from 10,000-70,000 (yeah, right) words. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novella

I tend to consider anything less than 10,000 a short story, anything between 10,000-40,000 a novella and anything over that a novel. That was before I learned of novelettes.

Strangely, my book, Redemption, is less than 40,000 words yet I've never referred to it as anything but a novel. Perhaps I should stop calling it that...

Any thoughts on this topic?

My novels tend to get a bit long. My first one, is around 85,000 words. Book 2 in the series is somewhere around 93k. When I was half-way in the middle of writing Book3, I thought I'd never even get to 70k words. It's my longest one yet at close to 96k.
I've read somewhere that anything over 50k is considered novel length, 17-40k is a novella. But I'm sure everyone has their own ideas about that. I've never heard the term novellette.