Word Counts - Amazon.com

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Pepper653

I found out that you can find out the word count on any book listed on Amazon.com As long as it has the 'search inside' feature listed.

click up on 'text stats' and it will tell you the word count for the book.

Now I'm even more confused about word counts LOL!!

I pulled up a few of my favorites.

Took a random page and counted the number of lines page, 30

approx 10-13 words per line, total book pages 228

They listed the word count at 47,000 How the heck did they come up with this number.

Are they excluding words such as, I, but, the, and, etc?
 

Pepper653

Do a search on 'The Notebook'.

click on it to open, as if you were going to read the reviews.

Up at the top of the page, there are a few selections up under

The Notebook (Mass Market Paperback)

(text stat) <--click on this, then scroll down.

Words:
49,122​


It has 256 pages.

I took a random page it had 30 lines on it.

Just an est of say 250 words per page and 256 pages, even if there were a bunch of blank and half filled pages you would think it would still avg out to be more than 49k?
 
aadams73

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Must be fairly accurate. Here it is listed as 48,978 words:

http://tinyurl.com/knnsm

On Nicholas Sparks website he also mentions the low word count of this particular book.
 

Pepper653

Yes this is very interesting.

I checked a few of my favorites, ie Dean Koontz, and most of them were all around 50 - 60k .

300+ pages long, 300+ words per page but still only listed low word counts.

I guess I'm just surprised because you hear so much about novel length

The avg novel is at least 80k

Novella 40-60k

and stuff like that. Some of the books I checked I know were not marketed as a novella.

Now I'm going to check out Harry Potter! LOL!! :)
 
maestrowork

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Pepper653 said:
Do a search on 'The Notebook'.

click on it to open, as if you were going to read the reviews.

Up at the top of the page, there are a few selections up under

The Notebook (Mass Market Paperback)

(text stat) <--click on this, then scroll down.

Words:
49,122​


It has 256 pages.

I took a random page it had 30 lines on it.

Just an est of say 250 words per page and 256 pages, even if there were a bunch of blank and half filled pages you would think it would still avg out to be more than 49k?
Click to expand...

I know the Notebook is about 54,000-word long. But being off by 5K is not too strange. Besides, with blanks and stuff (especially if there are lots of dialogue), you will get a much lower word count than 250/page.

I checked my own page: The Pacific Between, and it says 71,000 words, which is off by about 4000 -- not a big deal.
 
Ronda

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Here's what I find confusing about word count:

The Industry counts 250 words per page, so one hears that if your novel is 300 pages long, it is 75,000 words long. This is typically based on using Courier font. But if you use Times New Roman, it will take up less space, so the same book will be considerably shorter, perhaps 250 pages instead of 300.

Also, using 1" margins, I only get 25 lines per page if I count the header line.

What fun, right?

Ronda
 
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Ronda said:
Here's what I find confusing about word count:

The Industry counts 250 words per page, so one hears that if your novel is 300 pages long, it is 75,000 words long. This is typically based on using Courier font. But if you use Times New Roman, it will take up less space, so the same book will be considerably shorter, perhaps 250 pages instead of 300.

Also, using 1" margins, I only get 25 lines per page if I count the header line.

What fun, right?

Ronda
Click to expand...
If you go into Format/Paragraph, under Line Spacing, select Exactly 25 pt, & it should give you 25 lines/page
 

jules

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Unless you're on A4 paper, at which point you need to specify exactly 27pt instead.
 
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