MS-Word Word Count Differs Between .doc and .rtf

I wouldn't worry about it. Read through, make sure there is no junk causing an issues and just go with whatever the count says it is.

Burl Kenneth Sloan said:

Is it even worth worrying about?

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It really isn't; just eyeball the file and make sure that it looks ok, without any odd formatting issues, or anything.

Software's definition of a word is rather complicated; what about numbers written as text? What about dates? What about hyphenated words? What about . . . .

So view word count as a +/- kind of thing.

... yep about the software definitions. To see what gets counted just do a word count of a selected paragraph. Count the words yourself and compare Word's count. Then you can take a good guess as to what is and what is not getting counted. (I think older versions of Word have more inaccurate counts.)

157,000 > 154,00 by 2%. At 154,000, you already have a problem of excessive length, by about 33%.

caw

ellipses and hyphens are counted as words in some formats. If you do elipses as . . . it will count it as three words. Don't worry about it if you're not seeing issues with the text.

blacbird said:

157,000 > 154,00 by 2%. At 154,000, you already have a problem of excessive length, by about 33%.

caw

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How do you know the length is too much? She didn't mention genre. Lots of books are a great deal longer than that.

Mustafa said:

How do you know the length is too much? She didn't mention genre. Lots of books are a great deal longer than that.

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Unless it's SF/F, most publishers aren't interested in debut manuscripts much over 100K words. For most genres (other than SF/F), current preferences are closer to 80K words.

The OP didn't mention genre. If it's epic fantasy, 150K+ will still be a bit of a hard sell, but if the book is really good, it's doable.

For any other genre from a debut author, the book has be to way more than 'really good' to garner interest at 150K+ words.

Hence, 150K words is excessive by 50%, actually, not 33%.

Just so this doesn't turn in to an argument, both Terie and Blacbird are saying the same thing (just saying it differently).

In most cases 150k is way over the generally preferred word count (although there are always exceptions; you might be writing a textbook for all we know).

Burl Kenneth Sloan said:

I can't begin to describe how frustrating the length thing has been for me over the last two or three years.

The original, first, rough draft came in at over 218,000. Even I knew that was too long, but my thought process was to write the story, then come back and edit it down.

I've seen a lot out on the web that says to limit to 75,000 or 80,000. But then Jane Smiley's book Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel says typical novel length is between 100,000 and 175,000. I think I also saw Janet Reid (Query Shark) say something about keeping it under 200,000 (I'm not 100% certain it was her blog I was reading when I saw that).

On the other hand, neither of them distinguished between a first novel and one from an established writer...and I do see much more about keeping it at 75,000 or thereabouts.

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These things also fluctuate over time. Higher words counts were acceptable not too long ago, but the norms have dropped down again for the past few years. Smiley's book was published seven years ago.

And yes, authors with established track records and readerships have much more leeway for bigger books than those without.

Terie said:

These things also fluctuate over time. Higher words counts were acceptable not too long ago, but the norms have dropped down again for the past few years. Smiley's book was published seven years ago.

And yes, authors with established track records and readerships have much more leeway for bigger books than those without.

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Several very well regarded presses open to unagented, first time authors, specifically request that book length fall into the 95K to 140K word range (generally for sf/f). I was only pointing out that deeming something "too long" when one doesn't know the plans of the author, is a bit presumptuous.

RE: your word count. You haven't indicated just what you mean by "finished".

My most recently unpublishable novel (realistic literary) was at 135,000 when I first considered it "finished", which was a couple of editorial passes after the first draft. The queries were rejected, uniformly, with the only reasons ever given being "length".

I have reworked it extensively, eliminating only one single chapter (about 3500 words) I decided was digressive, and the rest with small cuts here or there for a variety of reasons, but eliminating nothing in the way of story. It is now at 99,000-something. Which means I cut about 35% of that original length.

Which means, I'll bet, that you can do the same. At that percentage, it would get you down into the 115,000 word range, and be more attractive to many agents and publishers.

caw

Word count

Interesting that the word count increased by >3000 words. That must have something to do with the conversion and not with the joining of the various chapters.

Did you, by any chance, make one big *.doc file and see what the word count was that way? That would have been helpful to know.

Also, you did not have to convert to RTF. You can use Amazon's free conversion service to convert your *.doc file to the Kindle format. You just send your document as an attached file to the free converter, and you will have it returned by email within seconds or minutes. I have done it many times.