In 2017, the downward trend has continued, with an average book length of. Pages by paperback uses an industry standard formula for english language publishing of taking the average number of words per page and multiplying it by the average number of characters per word five including a space, for six total, the product of which is then used to divide against the total character count of the project. Every category will have an average length, including childrens books, young adult, business books, etc. The average singlespaced document typed in 12point font contains about 500 words per page, but that can vary pretty drastically depending on your formatting. There are plenty of books that purposefully play with the word counts of their chapters. Further, that font and size will put 49 singlespaced lines on a page. A statistical analysis of robert jordans the wheel of time. Weighing in at over 4 million words, the wheel of time is assuredly among the longest fantasy series out there, although reliable data on the matter is elusive. This reduction will be very small, like maybe 12 lines less per page, and 510 pages less for the book. I am writing a novel right now, and im up to 4025 words in 10.
Armed with these word counts, i now have a range of lengths that have been proven popular. James patterson the mostselling author in the world is famous for his tiny chapter of a page and a half around 250500 words. In other words, a 12page story tends to be roughly 3000 words, etc. It depends on the font you are using, of course, but in general, 250300 words per page.
Inciting incident, plot point 1, midpoint, plot point 2, denouement. If using 12 point times or times roman font, its about 10 english words per line, on average. To fill a page in word, you would need around 500 words, 1. Frequently asked questions getting published meg cabot. How to calculate a word count per page pen and the pad. When the final work is printed for sale and published, the number of words per page will differ. Amazon ebook page length by genre kindle page length. I have a few books with varying numbers of words in them. The average wordcount for adult fiction is between 70,000 to 120,000 words.
Because dialogue requires paragraph breaks, there will be fewer words than if you have a few pages of full paragraphs instead of dialogue. So, if you have an hour to write and aim to get down 300 words, you might wonder, how. Publishers want to know the overall length of your book. Generally, your book needs to hit the mark of 40,000 words before it can be considered a novel.
Words counts of bestselling novels better novel project. The typical books words per page count tends to range between 225 and 275an average of 250. Estimate your page count book designer linda parke. You can see there is a lot of variation in word length, especially in epic high fantasy, where books can stretch beyond 200,000 words or sink as low as 50,000. Yes, its possible to break this model by having lots of staccato dialog, or paragraphs that are more than 250 words long, but those are extreme cases. The 5 x 8 trim size means about 250 words per page. Larger print, or smaller print, of course, and wider. That will tell you how many pages you have written. So if you are working on a novel, take the number of words you have written and divide it by 250. The word count at big five publishers had a slightly narrower range. Heres how 90,000 words which is 360 pages at 250 words per page breaks down by act.
Heres how pavita singh of pavedita in palo alto, california, breaks down costs for editing services based on word count and type of editing copy editing or. Just to keep in mind, the average one spaced page usually contains about 3000 characters or 500 words. 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. So, if you have an hour to write and aim to get down 300 words, you might wonder, how many pages is 300 words and the answer is less than one. Its no longer necessary to estimate according to the 250wordsperpage formula. 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. Then if you divide that number by the number of chapters you have written, it will give you an average number of pages in each chapter. At one extreme you get large print books with 250 words on the page. This page examines a couple of trends loosely associated with quality. Some wikipedians anticipate the rate of new article creation eventually slowing down, and effort going instead to improve the quality of existing articles. Most ebooks i see are double spaced, which makes their pages clearer but also reduces the number of words per page.
Most agree that under 1,000 words would be rather short and that over 5,000 might be rather too long. Many category editors find it easier to judge the length of a book in the way theyve always done. Estimate a small reduction for the linesperpage and the numberofpages values. Calculate the number of pages using your current word count and the appropriate formula below, calculate the number of pages you can expect in your finished book. When i write technical articles, theyre usually 600 words and about a page and a half. A manuscript for a novel is typically 500 words per page if singlespaced. This number was significantly different from the average we had seen for the estimated print length that had been given in the product details of each books amazon sales page. Therefore, a 55,000 word book should be about 200 manuscript pages. Whether or not a book has more or less words per page depends on the layout, the physical size of the pages, the linespacing, the length of paragraphs, and the size of the font. Ultimately, you can expect there to be roughly 300 words per page in a book you write as a whole. In technical material, the average reading rate is approx 50 to 75 words a.
Id guess that the actual average number of words in a novel was somewhere close. Before our book page count calculator, you had to dig around through multiple sources to figure out how many words per page for your exact font size and then do the math. Multiply the average number of words per line by the number of lines on a full page. This is an art rather than a science but here are a few tips. For manuscripts, the answer is about 250300 words per page if it is doublespaced. You can use comparable, successful books as models to determine the length. On average, one doublespaced page has 250300 words. The average reading speed is 200 to 250 words a minute in nontechnical material roughly 2 minutes per page. Using this exercise, you should end up with a good idea of book length expectations for a novel like yours. Most adult books are about 90,000 words, and no longer than 100,000 words unless youre jk rowling. Nonfiction wordcounts sit between 70,000120,000 words. So that comes out to about 400 a page and then factor in the double spacing and you get to 250 or so. The average adult novel runs approximately 100,000 words while those in other categories run 80120,000 words.
Calculate book page count using word count for book design. Nonfiction books tend to be shorter, around 45,000 words on average, and novels ten to be longer, around 80,000 words on average. Excluding endnotes and index, the book has about 200 pages of text, which means its total word count is about 74,000 words. To get an idea of what your book will look like you need to match the number of words per page on your word processing page to the finished printed page. Size comparisons page is the number of words per article. The industry standard for a manuscript page, however, is a firm 250 words. Based on data from our marketplace, we have found out that the average proofreading rate per page amounts to. Some will tell you 2,500 words is the average, while others will say that 3,000 to 5,000 word chapters are more likely to be the norm.
For the larger, 6 x 9 trim size, would be about 300 words per page. Richard castle, played by actor nate fillion, is decripting a code and mentions that the average number of words per page in his nikki heat books is just bel. The average across a sample of 50 books in august 2015 showed 172 words per kindle edition normalized page. If you want to know the total word count for your document, then multiply this number by the number of pages it contains. Some 6090k ya books get classified as hilo, but i dont think they were specifically written for the category. In 2015, the drop resumed as the average fell to 345. How does your book measure compare to whats succeeding in todays marketplace. While a general guideline is one page is 500 words single spaced or 250 words double spaced, this is a ballpark figure. An average doublespaced manuscript page has about 250 words on it. Though the average word count of a chapter is around 2,000 5,000 words, it all depends on your story.
Simply divide the total word count from your word document by the number of words per page. Books can be as short as 25,000 words, around 100 pages, or as long as 3 million words, or about 1,000 pages. If you want to calculate any other word count for a 4. Now that you know the average number of words per page in your book, you can calculate the page count with a little arithmetic. Readers looking for a good beachread in the mystery section will not likely gravitate towards a 1,000page book. As a publisher who has laid out dozens of books for printinga 50,000 word manuscript should end up somewhere between 180 and 220 pages. 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.
The society for editors and proofreaders sfep suggests that most professional proofreaders should be able to work through about ten pages per hour with 300 words per page. As with everything else when it comes to writing a book, these are only guidelinesnot rules. 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. The point is that the perpage count is an estimate that will average out over time, and its good enough for most purposes.
Academic books might put 600 words on a page with works of reference squeezing in words. On average, there are about 300 words per page in a book. Writing middle grade a look at the numbers hannah holt. Book page count calculator how many pages is my novel. How many words per page are there in a typical novel. If you doubt this, test your reading speed there is a reading speed test elsewhere in this site. 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. According to amazons great text stats feature, the median length for all books is about 64,000 words. The average singlespaced document typed in 12point font contains about 500 words per page, but that can vary pretty drastically depending on.
I actually remember this perhaps incorrectly from an episode of the tv series castle. Most middle grade novels are between 40,000 and 69,000 words long. Its too much hassle and timeconsuming time you couldve spent refining and perfecting your book content. Hello, i was just wondering how many words the average novel has on a page.
As a general guideline, chapters should be between 3,000 to 5,000 words. This averages to about 22 to 23 chapters per novel, with the average chapter length around 4,280 words. These figures represent continuous words with no blank lines or breaks. Paperback books typically contain how many words per page. I use the target average of 1,500 words per chapter.
Each page contains about 34 lines, with an average word count of 11 words per line, thus 375 words per page. This gives you 200 large print, 500 for an academic book with 350 words per paperback page as a working average. The average mean word count was about 53,000 words. 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. Depending on the text formatting, a page word count may include from 200 large print up to 600 words academic book. An approximate word count round numbers based on what your wp tells you enables them to estimate costs and other factors involved in printing a. All we have to do is use the wp tool that shows word count. Using amazons number of words as a guide, 5,000 words would equal 26. However, paranormal and ya fantasy books appear to remain largely in the 80120,000 range, with books targeted at children or younger teenagers sometimes dipping to 5070,000. Write out your basic storyline in major plot points only. Also, the chapters are evenly divided into 3 titled parts. Wikipedia suggests it is some 1 million words longer than the malazan book of the fallen, its chief competition for the honor omitting shared universe tales like those of mercedes. Roughly how many pages would 50,000 words produce in a.