70k words.

Bartholomew · May 3, 2006

My science fiction peice comes to a close at a nice tidy 70,000-ish words.

Too small? =|

icerose · May 3, 2006

Check your target publisher. Baen doesn't want anything less than 100K. DAW wants between 80k-100k, same with Tor. Find the publisher you want to submit to, and look at their submission guidelines. Same goes for agents, that will give you a good idea on length.

Bartholomew · May 3, 2006

icerose said:
Check your target publisher. Baen doesn't want anything less than 100K. DAW wants between 80k-100k, same with Tor. Find the publisher you want to submit to, and look at their submission guidelines. Same goes for agents, that will give you a good idea on length.

Thanks.

Cheers,

Bart

jules · May 4, 2006

Is that by word processor count, or number-of-words-per-page estimate? Remember that if it's the former, you might find the latter is a slightly higher number.

bsolah · May 4, 2006

jules said:
Is that by word processor count, or number-of-words-per-page estimate? Remember that if it's the former, you might find the latter is a slightly higher number.

Yep, I'm with Jules. You have to do the word count through a special method. This is because publishers don't actually judge by the number of words, but by the amount of space taken up. If I remember correctly, set your MS to 12pt Courier, double spaced. Each page should then be roughly 250 words. I may be wrong on this. Anyone heard of this before?

Aconite · May 4, 2006

bsolah said:
If I remember correctly, set your MS to 12pt Courier, double spaced. Each page should then be roughly 250 words. I may be wrong on this. Anyone heard of this before?

12 pt. Courier, double-spaced, with 1-inch margins all around, 8.5 x 11 paper, with widows-and-orphans protection supressed (so there are the same number of lines on each page), gives 250 words per page. Typesetters need to be more accurate than that, but authors don't.

DVGuru · May 4, 2006

What are widows and orphans and how would I eliminate them in Word?

Aconite · May 4, 2006

DVGuru said:
What are widows and orphans and how would I eliminate them in Word?

You get W&O when a paragraph is split so that one line of it is on one page, and the rest is on another. You want that to happen, to keep the number of lines per page consistant. You can usually turn off W&O protection (which forces two lines of a paragraph onto a page) by unchecking an option box. I'm sure somebody will be along in a minute or two to tell you where to find the setting in Word, if you don't find it on your own by then.

bsolah · May 4, 2006

If you go to format>paragraph, you get this.

Bartholomew · May 4, 2006

I don't really count with the auto-word count thing. I just get an estimate by counting the number of characters in a line, dividing by six, then multiplying that by the number of lines, and then again by the number of pages.

bsolah said:
Yep, I'm with Jules. You have to do the word count through a special method. This is because publishers don't actually judge by the number of words, but by the amount of space taken up. If I remember correctly, set your MS to 12pt Courier, double spaced. Each page should then be roughly 250 words. I may be wrong on this. Anyone heard of this before?

icerose · May 4, 2006

I go with the others on word count.

25 lines per page, double spaced, courier 12, 400 pages = 100,000 words

Bartholomew · May 4, 2006

icerose said:
I go with the others on word count.

25 lines per page, double spaced, courier 12, 400 pages = 100,000 words

Holy Hell. Yeah, that certainly pads the word count. Are you sure thats honest?

How do you make it justify the number of lines per page? I have courier new 12, 402 pages, at 23 lines per page.

bsolah · May 4, 2006

That is honest. That's the standard method for word count. It looks like you have yourself a novel

Congratulations!

icerose · May 4, 2006

Bartholomew said:
Holy Hell. Yeah, that certainly pads the word count. Are you sure thats honest?

How do you make it justify the number of lines per page? I have courier new 12, 402 pages, at 23 lines per page.

I am serious and it is exactly what publishers tell you to do. The courier gives them space to work and its easier for them to red ink.

In word perfect, it does that, I have to go into the line spacing and adjust mine to like 1.95 in order to get 25 lines per page. Get it to 25 but keep it as close to 2 as possible.

Bartholomew · May 4, 2006

Augh!

*Goes to futz with MS word*

...

Can one of you kind gents save me a day of keyboard slamming and tell me how one goes about obtaining 25 lines per page in MS word? o.o ~ The program is fighting me.

EDIT

Ahhh, found it. There should really be a formatting sticky. =)

Yay! 91,500 words.

DeadlyAccurate · May 4, 2006

Try this (saw it somewhere, maybe here):

1) File | Page Setup
set your margins to 1.2" all around <OK>

2) Edit | Select All
Change your font to 12 pt Courier New

With everything still selected,

Format | Paragraph

Spacing: set line spacing to Exactly 24 pt

On the Line & Page Breaks tab, make sure Widow/Orphan control is unchecked <OK>

With this method, you'll notice 25 lines per page consistently.

icerose · May 4, 2006

Make sure widows and orphans is off.
In Word Perfect its under Format - Keep Text Together - then unselect the box widows and orphans. Someone else posted a picture from the program that has it in paragraph.

Then go to line numbering, and turn it on, for that and all subsequent pages.
Format - Line- Numbering

Second, go to line spacing and adjust it until you get 25 lines per page, fitting perfectly.
Format - Line- Spacing.

Then just fiddle with it until you have it. If you are going to have headers with page numbering, name and title, make sure you have inserted that because it could affect the body of the page.

I don't know how different word perfect is from Microsoft, but if you can't find them, the helper will be able to walk you through it.

EDIT

Congrats on finding it! And wow, WP is a whole lot different from microsoft. I have never heard of the 1.2 margins, I thought it was 1 inch all around. Hmm.

Sage · May 4, 2006

DeadlyAccurate said:
Try this (saw it somewhere, maybe here):

1) File | Page Setup
set your margins to 1.2" all around <OK>

2) Edit | Select All
Change your font to 12 pt Courier New

With everything still selected,

Format | Paragraph

Spacing: set line spacing to Exactly 24 pt

On the Line & Page Breaks tab, make sure Widow/Orphan control is unchecked <OK>

With this method, you'll notice 25 lines per page consistently.

Shouldn't it be 1'' margins all around? With one inch margins and spacing set to "Exactly 25 pt," you should have 25 lines per page.

DeadlyAccurate · May 4, 2006

I just tested it, and yes, that works, too. Each page I counted had exactly 25 lines.

Christine N. · May 4, 2006

But, as Miss Snark says, don't obsess over it. She'll take the MS word count count. I mean, of course, the 250 /page count is higher, b/c of the empty half pages at the beginning and end of each chapter, and the fact that all lines aren't the same length.

What really matters is... how much paper is this book going to take up? That's what publishers want to know. That can change with font and formatting too.

Incidentally, my latest Middle Grade fantasy novel stands at around 70K, MS word count. I have a feeling my editor is going to want to cut some of that, but that's where it is now.

veinglory · May 4, 2006

(As an aside to non-Americans--set you page to US A4 first, Europen A4 is a little longer and sometimes squeezes another line in.)

RG570 · May 4, 2006

Does anyone know why the word processors don't just count every single word? It seems like it would be a simple thing to do.

Bartholomew · May 4, 2006

RG570 said:
Does anyone know why the word processors don't just count every single word? It seems like it would be a simple thing to do.

They do. Thats sort of the problem.

A word count needs to represent how much space your document consumes, not an exact number of ink drops.

Maryn · May 5, 2006

If you're going for the 250-words-to-the-page word count, you should be aware that a 'word' is six characters, any kind. Yes, you want 25 lines to the page, but you need 60 characters to a line (a.k.a. 10 words) for this to work out right. Set the left and right margins to 1.25 inches and you'll get a 60-character line.

Maryn, not math-friendly

Bartholomew · May 5, 2006

Maryn said:
If you're going for the 250-words-to-the-page word count, you should be aware that a 'word' is six characters, any kind. Yes, you want 25 lines to the page, but you need 60 characters to a line (a.k.a. 10 words) for this to work out right. Set the left and right margins to 1.25 inches and you'll get a 60-character line.

Maryn, not math-friendly

Ahhh! And this is why Courier New is used... the characters are all the same size.

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