Words Per Page ?

Methinks the folks in Young Adult forum are more likely to know the answer! Moving thread from FAQ...

-Derek

I'm sure someone will be along soon to give you a definitive answer, Ugawa, but it seems to me there may be no definitive per page answer. I would imagine it varies depending upon page size, font size, proportion of short dialogue lines to full narrative lines etc.,

It varies a lot. Anywhere from 150 to 300 would be typical I suppose.

I picked up the one nearest to me, Clementine by Sara Pennypacker. It has about 18 or 19 lines per page with an average of 8 words a line. The font is fairly large. Others will have 20 to 25 lines or more with maybe 10 to 12 words a line on average.

Yep, and my Amber Spyglass is 32 lines pp at say 11wpl = circa 352

alleycat said:

It varies a lot. Anywhere from 150 to 300 would be typical I suppose.

I picked up the one nearest to me, Clementine by Sara Pennypacker. It has about 18 or 19 lines per page with an average of 8 words a line. The font is fairly large. Others will have 20 to 25 lines or more with maybe 10 to 12 words a line on average.

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I looked at a few others. They had between 240 and 300 words per page. Otto of the Silver Hand had a little over 300 words per page (rough estimate).

If you wanted to research it further, Amazon has "text facts" on some books. It will give you the number of words total and then you can divide by the number of pages for a general estimate.

I may have misspoke when I mentioned Clementine. I guess that's not really considered a YA. It was just the first thing I picked up. Clementine would be classified as a chapter book, I believe.

I heard somewhere (author site *shrug*) that it's 250 as a rule. I hope that helps.

alainn_chaser said:

I heard somewhere (author site *shrug*) that it's 250 as a rule. I hope that helps.

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That's manuscript pages (in standard format), not printed book pages.

Roughly speaking, a standard adult hardback will have about 350-400 words per page, but typesetters can increase that or decrease that quite easily. Also, bear in mind that's *taking up the space of 350 or so words*, not 350 actual words, as this will vary accoridng to paragraph lengths, the amount of dialogue. the margins and other white space. It's down to the publisher in the end - do they want to make the book look longer (and increase its perceived value for money) or do they want to save printing costs if they can compress it to a more economical wordcount. (One - adult, SF/F - publisher I heard speak recently said that 416pages was a good length for them (about 95000 words), so they had a spine that was thick enough to be noticed in the bookshop shelves.)

I once took two novels on holiday. One had much smaller print than the other, so though there was only a 50-page difference, the difference in word count was something like 80,000.

Children's/MG/YA books traditionally tend to be printed in larger typefaces than adult books (at least in the UK they are), so the wordcount per page will decrease accordingly.

In one of my publishing classes, my prof said the rule of thumb is about 250 words. As she's an editor for some press I tend to beleive her. Of course this increases and decreases depending on the genre and reader. Middle grade will be less, adult will be alot more.

I think for YA published novels it's generally 250 words per page. I did some research of several YA novels I have laying around here last year, and that is generally what they all came out to (keeping in mind page differences when there was a lot of dialogue, etc.).

Hope that helps.