Because dialogue requires paragraph breaks, there will be fewer words than if you have a few pages of full paragraphs instead of dialogue. Word count estimates are not guaranteed to be accurate. If a page is 500 words on an ipad, and 250 words on a kindle, it might be only 120 words on a phone. I would recommend buying a few books of the type you like to get some ideas of how large a compilation you want to make and, if you are publishing it yourself, what type of binding, paper stock, etc. Mark up your manuscript where you think the page breaks might go, or place the text on 28 separate pages, staple them together like a book, and read the story as you turn the pages. What is the average number of pages in a chapter answers. Learn how to estimate your page count and how long your book should be depending on your genre. Aug 05, 2019 additionally, knowing your word count before you start writing can help you better plan your narrative arc as well as your writing schedule. What is the average number of pages in a textbook answers. Id guess that the actual average number of words in a novel was somewhere. Frequently asked questions getting published meg cabot.
The truth is the number of words per page depends on a variety of factors such as the type of font, the font size, spacing elements, margin spacing, and paragraph length to name a few. Most editors wouldnt recommend going over 80,000, as it will inspire bad taste among readers. Before diving into the specifics of genrebased word counts, lets look at the broader picture of average book length. But depending on the ereading device and the font size setting, it varies significantly between a phone, a tablet, or a kindle.
Customers are used to the 32 page lengtheven if they cant tell you an exact count of pagesand it seems a good value. Do this for several books in your niche to get a targeted range. The average fiction book is about 80,000 to 100,000 words, which is about 246 to 307 ebook pages. In outlining your book in 3 easy steps, editor shawn coyne says, the average novel today is about 90,000 words. The number of pages changes depending on the number of words, the font and the font size. These questions made us fill the need of a book page count calculator we put at the bottom of this page. Sketch out your outline, make sure your structure works, and then start coming up with more clever titles for the chapters and parts, if you use those. Stephen king word count 112263 274,672 bag of bones 203,3 black house 252,270 blockade billy 15,917 carrie 60,718 cell 121,931 christine 193,602 cujo 121,150 cycle of the werewolf 15,955 desperation. Stephen king word count 112263 274,672 bag of bones 203,3 black house 252,270 blockade billy 15,917 carrie 60,718 cell 121,931 christine 193,602 cujo 121,150 cycle of the werewolf 15,955 desperation 195,011 doctor sleep. Aug 02, 2008 while its possible to go over or under the 32pages, it is often best to keep to this standard. For a typical 6by9inch printed book, youll want the final page count to be divisible by four include room for a title page, dedication page, table of contents, page, and acknowledgments page in your count as well. The smaller your trim size, the more pages will be required for your content.
The figure was found through looking at a number of books text stats, until brave new worlds 64,531 word count landed in the exact center of all books50% of books have fewer words and 50% of books have more words. Heres a simple way to calculate your books approximate page count using the word count of your manuscript. That will give you a good guide if you want to emulate it. That gives us a rough range of 61,00089,000 words, with about 3 out of 4 queried ya books falling into that range. My next traditionally published book, the author training manual writers digest books, february 2014, was supposed to be around 50,000 wordsthats what i agreed to in my contract and what my publisher planned on when determining page count, design, expenses, profitandloss statement, etc. In the opposite direction, it can give a more accurate estimate of how many pages you have created if you only know the word count. Most adult books are about 90,000 words, and no longer than 100,000 words unless. The average wordcount for adult fiction is between 70,000 to 120,000 words. Search for word count totals in books word counters. Within the publishing industry we tend to talk about the length of a book in words rather than in pages.
Have you had lots of questions over the years about words mirrored margins. Neither too long nor too short, this book length signals a novelists competency and knowledge of the publishing market to prospective agents and editors. Targeted for 2 to 8yearold kids, this type of book typically has between 400 800 words. Amazon ebook page length by genre kindle page length klytics. The number of words in a novel will vary depending on the genre. Ultimately, you can expect there to be roughly 300 words per page in a book you write as a whole. Obviously a thick paged picture book for a 3yearold is going to be vastly different from the mouse and the motorcycle, a book for a ten year old to dig into for the first time. The average nonfiction book is about 50,000 to 75,000 words, which is about 153 to 230 ebook pages. Word count for picture books the standard is text for 32 pages.
My books tend to all hit around 95,000 words which comes out around 300 to 320 pages single spaced, formatted 9x6 for ebooks. The end of 1944 saw another cost increase, leading marvel to reduce their books to 52 pages. All you have to do is find the amazon sales rank for any ebook or print book on amazon and type that number in to our simple amazon book sales calculator below. Book page count calculator how many pages is my novel. Multiply up by the number of pages and get to a rough word count. Only 8% of all those cozy mystery books were short reads. Picture book word count, and other rules that are meant to be. Excluding endnotes and index, the book has about 200 pages of text, which means its total word count is about 74,000 words.
Thing is i always come into the whole lets create a book mindset thinking that a book should have at least 100 pages or even more to look like a real book. Page count also plays a role in the royalties youll retain since printondemand companies will share part of your compensation. While a general guideline is one page is 500 words single spaced or 250 words double spaced, this is a ballpark figure. How to calculate a word count per page pen and the pad. Well explain two easy methods to calculate book page count. Estimate your page count fiona raven book designer. Customers are used to the 32 page lengtheven if they cant tell you an exact count of pages. Maybe im old school, but i really have no idea whatsoever what the average page count is for a kindle book. Many, yes, but there are exceptions due to the speed at which the narrator talks. This tool is useful when writing essays at university to determine how many pages you are required to write. This calculator provides an indication only and works most accurately for an academic essay with four paragraphs per page and no sub. This line count includes blank lines between paragraphs as well as lines with just a single word. Once you have a vision for your book small, standard, or wide formatyou can move on to the second step in deciding how many words you should write.
How does your book measure compare to whats succeeding in todays marketplace. According to amazons great text stats feature, the median length for all books is about 64,000 words. If you are an author of a book or know of a book s accurate wordcount, contact me. That is not meant to say that cozy short reads will not work for you, however, it is a clear indication that cozy readers prefer normal books in terms of page count. I submitted backhoe joe to my agent divided into 16 spreads. For starters, the average count for a page in a book is 250300 depending upon its trim size, margins, and font size. So for each part or section in your book, add 2 pages to your book page count. How many pages would my manuscript be in paperback. It seems like ya novels are getting longer and longer nowadays, but maybe my attention span is getting shorter. Take a typical 250word per page, 15 pages of good content contains around 3,750 words.
I agree that it seems like for a debut author, the agent really looks at that word count. For novels specifically in the young adult genre, the typical range is between 55,000 79,999 words. For example, defending jacob has a word count of 122,475 and my utility comes up with 115,320. Jan 08, 2018 you can easily calculate book page count using the word count from your word document. The more pages in your book, the more the cost of printing will be and the smaller your profit margin.
Still, if you have any feedback id love to hear it. I studied the page turns in my favorite picture books and read blog posts about layout taras picture book dummy, picture book construction. The bestselling creativity guide which i edited, the artists way, is one of the shining examples of this wide format book. One factor can be measured, though, and that is the average page length of a book. The average picture book is 32 pages long, but the front matter title page, page, etc. According to amazon s great text stats feature, the median length for all books is about 64,000 words.
Of course, rules are made to be broken, especially in literature. Reading length is a participant in the amazon services llc associates program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to and affiliated sites. Well, calculating it out, that would mean the average book was 240480 pages. Calculate book page count using word count for book design. It is one poem per page, but if your work is longer, a poem may take multiple pages. Im curious about your advice compose the novel in the standard format from the start rather than changing it later why does this matter. You want 50,000 to 85,000 words for a fulllength selfhelp book, half that for a selfpublished ebook. And dont forget to calculate what your word count will be. Surely when writing the important thing is to get words on the page even if theyre in pink comic sans. It makes quite a difference whether you want to publish a childrens picture book, a 50recipe smoothie book, a science fiction novel or a technical encyclopedia. With longer books, you can get a rough count by adding up the number of words on an average page and multiplying by the total number of pages. Count the number of lines on each page to get the linesper page. And this ebook page length differs significantly depending on the book genre.
Estimate your page count book designer fiona raven. Oct 23, 2009 in a decent novel, the average number of pages per chapter is usually 7. If theres a business book you admire, why not count the pages, tot up the words on an average page, and see how long it is in total. One of my biggest problems as a publisher is having authors deliver more than was agreed to. Oct 26, 2018 in a nutshell, the trim size dictates your page count. Each page contains about 34 lines, with an average word count of 11 words per line, thus 375 words per page. Weve typeset many books and therefore know how to calculate the number of words that fit on an average book page. While its possible to go over or under the 32 pages, it is often best to keep to this standard. The highest word count was 115,000, the lowest was 47,000, and the average was 75,000. Go to a bookstore and support your fellow authors by purchasing these books, or check them out of the library. In 2015, the drop resumed as the average fell to 345. For paperbacks you get 2550 lines per page, with 35 being a good average. The old man and the sea was about 25 to 30,000 words. A 40,000 to 80,000 word memoir is around 150265 pages, a standard booklength for the genre.
How to set the retail price of your book mill city press. Just remember, with so much diversity in nonfiction, you have even less of. As you can see, a smaller trim size will produce more pages for the same word count, and a larger trim size will produce less. Big, epic stories get anywhere from 120,000 to 200,000 words.
Typically, a book that is published in paperback format at a length of 300400 pages will come in between 80,000 and 100,000 words. The length can vary greatly between genres, though. Using your current word count and the appropriate formula below, calculate the number of pages you can expect in your finished book. Nonfiction wordcounts sit between 70,000120,000 words. If you want to get a target for your nonfiction book, the best thing may be to look at a dozen or so bestselling books in the genreniche youre aiming at and see what their word counts are. Amazon ebook page length by genre kindle page length. Aug 14, 20 understanding book layouts and page margins joel, thanks a ton for all of your info. Check that the book actually starts on page 1 sometimes the stuff before it starts is counted then go to the last page before any bibliography, acknowledgements, appendices, etc. Multiply the average number of words per line by the number of lines on a full page. Ive read that amazon counts pages taking into account average page turns needed when actually reading the book on a kindle device or appso the page count includes both how many kindle pages it is for someone using a very large font, and someone using a very small font. Sep 11, 2010 i was looking online and most of the sources i found said the average number of words per novel page is 250, and the average words per book were 60,000120,000. I heard of books that are 10 pages like a report and others go higher than that. Better to have solid, clear information than rambling to make a page count.
If your book is divided into parts or sections, youll probably add a part or section divider page followed by a blank between each part or section. What is the average page length of topranking cozy mystery. How to put together a poetry manuscript for publication. That being said, this range is true for most books always do the research into comparable books and price your book accordingly. A minimum count for a nonfiction ebook is about 10,000 words, as long as the content is solid. In any case, to see how authors use this tactic to set their pacing, we also mapped out the word count of every chapter in four famous books. Memoir novel 80,000 words the most common rule for a memoir is that it should not go more than 80,000 words. When it gets closer to 1,000, editors and agents may shy away. By using these three options to more accurately define your writing, the words per page calculator should provide a better estimate on how many words you need to write to fill a page. But, he also mentions that the wizard of oz was 40,000 words. This website converts the number of words to the number of pages, online and for free. For childrens fiction, the general rule is the younger the audience the shorter the book, and for ya novels the average is 50,00070,000 words. May 14, 2018 literary agent paula munier says a 90,000 word count is the sweet spot for debut fiction. On average, there are about 300 words per page in a book.
But 75% of our tour stops are engaging with kids ages 812, or grades 26. If perhaps it had even more pictures it would be even a lot better. Even ignoring the fact that number of pages depends on your character and format i had a whole divine comedy in character6, i think, or 4, even, that was insanely thin, if were talking about lengththere is no one fits all. And as you can see, it varies, depending on the story. In 2011, the lists average length peaked at 467 pages.
However sometimes, like today, the reverse happens. The figure was found through looking at a number of books text stats, until brave new worlds 64,531 word count landed in the exact center of all books 50%. Compiling a list of longest novels yields different results depending on whether pages, words or characters are counted. May 11, 2009 word count and book length getting published was indeed a good blog post. If you want to know the total word count for your document, then multiply this number by the number of pages it contains.
At one extreme you get large print books with 250 words on the page. Have you ever wondered how the average ebook page length or word count differs by book genre. For a book that contains a fair amount of research, statistics, endnotes, charts or graphs, a color interior, or other details that make it an extensive and unique book, its reasonable to price the book higher. It contains 38 lines per page, with an average of 12 words per line, thus 456 words per book page. Another recommendation by tom corsonknowles from tck publishing. Sep 16, 2019 if theres a business book you admire, why not count the pages, tot up the words on an average page, and see how long it is in total. Amazon estimates a page count in an ebook to be around 187 words. The total page count excluding appendices and index is 204 pages, thus about 93,000 words. So itll be off on occasion, but it still works well for the average book. Having said all that, there are a number of conventions regarding word count. The average chapter word count of these novels falls within the 2,0005,000 range. If youve read our related article on how many words are in a novel youll recall that the typical word count for a novel according to is 80,000 to 109,000 words.
I was scared that agents would reject my book simply because i had got the length wrong. A 4 page picture book is too slim and not feasible. Length of a book is typically associated with its sizespecifically page count leading many to assume the largest and thickest book equates to its length. This move knocked it down to about 53 comic book story pages plus the 2 page text piece. Personally, i recommend at least 10,000 words for nonfiction, unless you can do it justice in less. Im currently on a book tour for my new 32page picture bookthe type of book that the internet, most agents, and editors typically say should be geared toward 48 yearolds. For example, if your book has 14 chapters, add 7 pages to your page count. Did you know you can estimate how many sales any ebook or print book on amazon is currently selling just by looking at its listing on amazon.