Number of words average book

I counted the number of words on page 7 of night whispers, then multiplied by the number of pages, then rounded, and so theres aout 4 words per book. 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. Stephen king word count 112263 274,672 bag of bones 203,3 black house 252,270 blockade billy 15,917 carrie 60,718 cell 121,931 christine 193,602 cujo 121,150 cycle of the werewolf 15,955 desperation 195,011 doctor sleep. Because of the wide variety of standard trade book sizes and layout configurations, estimating how long a book should be by the number of pages is generally not helpful. Once you have a vision for your booksmall, standard, or wide formatyou can move on to the second step in deciding how many words you should write. I believe the word count has increased as she wrote more books. What is the average number of words in a selfhelp book. Jun 24, 2019 you start the article off by posing the question. How to write a bestselling business book bloomberg. The word count is the number of words in a document or passage of text.

There are 4 books in the series and around 650 pages average in every book. 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. I have therefore made some averages, based on what ive heard from publishers and agents at childrens book events, and from research and reading. Jan 08, 2018 now that you know the average number of words per page in your book, you can calculate the page count with a little arithmetic. It covers all of my core initial free marketing strategies. Longer word counts allowed for fantasy, scifi, historical. With longer books, you can get a rough count by adding up the number of words on an average page and multiplying by the total number of pages. Stephen king word count 112263 274,672 bag of bones 203,3 black house 252,270 blockade billy 15,917 carrie 60,718 cell 121,931 christine 193,602 cujo 121,150 cycle of the werewolf 15,955 desperation. We all know of outliers within each genre that have been published well under, or well over, these word counts.

The bookreading habits of students in american schools. Word count for famous novels organized by hawthorn mineart, under books, writing. Some 6090k ya books get classified as hilo, but i dont think they were specifically written for the category. Feb 18, 2008 for the best answers, search on this site general rule of thumb is that a novel is 80k to 100k, but you can have 120k on larger novels.

Nonfiction books tend to be shorter, around 45,000 words on average, and novels ten to be longer, around 80,000 words on average. About how many words of that size are in your average 250 300 page book. Similarly, the number of pages in raw manuscripts typed into word can vary widely based on paper size, margins, font and space options. When it gets closer to 1,000, editors and agents may shy away. The total page count excluding appendices and index is 204 pages, thus about 93,000 words. For average word counts based on genre, see this handy reference. If you want to know the total word count for your document, then multiply this number by the number of pages it.

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. Targeted for 2 to 8yearold kids, this type of book typically has between 400 800 words. Average the count by taking the total number of words counted and divide by three. At an average reading rate of 125 words per minute, thats about 145 hours of reading. That was the formula in the good old days when courier was the only typeface and typewriters were king. For most publishers, a book is novellength when its between 50,000 and 110,000 words. And no agents or publishers would even look past that number. As a general guideline, chapters should be between 3,000 to 5,000 words. Virtually every book i try to shop by a debut author thats any longer than thatregardless of categoryreceives the same response from editors. What is the generally accepted number of words per page for a published novel. The third book is the kindle publishing bible and this is the gold mine for marketing. Amazon ebook page length by genre kindle page length.

Literary agent danielle zigner takes a look at typical novel lengths per genre and what appeals to publishers within the current marketplace. The page doublespaced on the right fills less than half the page. Different kinds of books should be a different length. 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.

Sep 20, 2019 for example, agatha christie, one of the bestselling mystery writers of all time, write between 40,000 and 60,000 words per book. Frequently asked questions about childrens writing by anne lemieux, david lubar and marilyn singer return to writing for children printmobilefriendly version. However sometimes, like today, the reverse happens. Therefore, a 55,000 word book should be about 200 manuscript pages. I am using this number count as a benchmark for my own storybook. Use these numbers as a baseline for your writing goals. All of these are average book word count ranges and should not be taken as the definitive word count you must reach in your book. Sep 20, 2009 determine the average number of words per page.

When the final work is printed for sale and published, the number of words per page will differ. Jul 23, 2012 so 50,000 words is the minimum for a nonfiction book. Calculate book page count using word count for book design. If you want to get a target for your nonfiction book, the best thing may be to look at a dozen or so bestselling books in the genreniche youre aiming at and see what their word counts are. Estimate your page count book designer fiona raven. It was 333 words which tends to be lower then the average picture book. Now that you know the average number of words per page in your book, you can calculate the page count with a little arithmetic. Most adult books are about 90,000 words, and no longer than 100,000 words unless youre jk rowling. For the larger, 6 x 9 trim size, would be about 300 words per page.

This may particularly be the case in academia, legal proceedings, journalism and advertising. The figure was found through looking at a number of books text stats. Right now, when it comes to novellength word count, its all about 90,000 words. I was scared that agents would reject my book simply because i had got the length wrong. May 14, 2018 literary agent paula munier says a 90,000 word count is the sweet spot for debut fiction. Books can be as short as 25,000 words, around 100 pages, or as long as 3 million words, or about 1,000 pages. 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 book s amazon sales page. Paperback books typically contain how many words per page.

Word count for famous novels, in ascending order by number of words. I have often looked this up and got different results, which makes it very confusing. Im presently working on a novel and want to make certain my. Word count is commonly used by translators to determine the price of a translation job. For those who like to keep track of their reading word count or those who want to encourage their kids to read more the harry potter books series is an. Ultimately, if they have five other books in your genre that are as good as. There is an average of 150 words on each page, so the number of words in the twilight series is around 400,000 words all.

A manuscript for a novel is typically 500 words per page if singlespaced. If you self pub, places such as amazon will print a book as low as 24 pages, so if your poetry is an epic poem it can be almost 1 book itself, say like beowolf. Divide the result by 10 to find the average number of words per line. The average wordcount for adult fiction is between 70,000 to 120,000 words. I actually remember this perhaps incorrectly from an episode of the tv series castle. Even if your kindle book is live on amazon, you may still take it down from the shelf, improve it to the new and expanded version and relaunch your book into the market again at any time. All of these are average book word count ranges and should not be taken as. Famous book series and novel word counts number of words. Now we have computers and word processing software. Jul 19, 2012 christopher richards, an oakland calif. How to find out the number of words in a book pen and. This should capture the authors writing style and provide a reliable estimate of the number of words used by the.

I heard 10,000 words can be accepted as an e book at a short length at least for nonfiction. Using amazons number of words as a guide, 5,000 words would equal 26. Multiply the average number of words per line by the number of lines on a full page. How to calculate a word count per page pen and the pad. These questions made us fill the need of a book page count calculator we put at the bottom of this page. Word counts of famous book series harry potter by jk rowling.

Sep 12, 2018 by book do you mean novel or nonfiction. Everything you need to know about word count and book length for books and novels and memoirs and. That divide expands to almost 120,000 more words a year in 8th grade, and then levels off at just above 100,000 more words a year through the high school years. What is the average number of words in a typical self help. Horror is much like mystery in the sense that you dont want to drag these novels on too long. According to amazons great text stats feature, the median length for all books is about 64,000 words. When combined, the total harry potter word count is over a million words. Once you have a vision for your book small, standard, or wide formatyou can move on to the second step in deciding how many words you should write. There is a basic method by which you compute an average it is standard math.

The second book is the kindle formatting bible its a step by step guide for formatting books for kindle and also stepbystep instructions on uploading your book to kindle and publishing it. It depends on the font you are using, of course, but in general, 250300 words per page. We will be using amazons estimation formula, which is that there are 300350 words in a page they do take into account images as well, if your ebook has those. Literary agent paula munier says a 90,000 word count is the sweet spot for debut fiction. Of course it begs the question, how much material does it take to become publishworthy. Most agree that under 1,000 words would be rather short and that over 5,000 might be rather too long. Simply divide the total word count from your word document by the number of words per page. This video explains why word count is important and the. Ya novels are rarely over 75k, historical novels go up to 120k, ditto speculative fiction. The harry potter books are popular, and once someone reads the first book in the series, they often end up reading the entire series. Having a too short or too long kindle book isnt a permanent irreversible mistake on selfpublishing on amazon. A novelist of my acquaintance insists that the only way to estimate the number of words in a book is to multiply the number of pages by 250.

If i aim for any university press how likely would they be in 35,000 words book. For example, agatha christie, one of the bestselling mystery writers of all time, write between 40,000 and 60,000 words per book. Nonfiction wordcounts sit between 70,000120,000 words. Obviously a thick paged picture book for a 3yearold is going to be vastly different from the mouse and the motorcycle, a book for a ten year old to dig into for the first time. It contains 38 lines per page, with an average of 12 words per line, thus 456 words per book page. To save the time and effort of counting wordbyword, often a rule of thumb for the average number of words per line was used, such. Discover the average number of words on a page by counting the number of words on three randomly picked full pages distributed throughout the book.

Book page count calculator how many pages is my novel. Neither too long nor too short, this book length signals a novelists competency and knowledge of the publishing market to prospective agents and editors. The report analyzes ar program data for the 201011 school year and shows the number of books and words that students in grades 1 to 12 read on average during that school year, as well as the average reading level of the 40 most commonly read. I guess 50,000 is a short novel and some early novels before goes as low as 40,000 which can be considered to be a novella. I would at least think 3 poems filling 24 pages is small, but doable. Dec 18, 2010 i believe the word count has increased as she wrote more books. Word counting may be needed when a text is required to stay within certain numbers of words. Usually, this is about 400 for a standard academic book but only about 350 if the page size is demy octavo. This is a general list of age categories and word counts for childrens books. These books are generally heftier in general, so for a 150page book you can target 45,000 words and 60,000 words for a 200page book. The 250 words perpage rule is a copysetting estimate. Apr 16, 2012 but that divide does not expand beyond an average of 10,000 words a year until 4th grade. The average across a sample of 50 books in august 2015 showed 172 words per kindle edition normalized page. Girls in 4th grade read just over 15,000 more words a year than boys.

How many words are there in the harry potter book series. 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 books 50% of books have fewer words and 50% of books have more words. For manuscripts, the answer is about 250300 words per page if it is doublespaced. The average nonfiction book is about 50,000 to 75,000 words, which is about 153 to 230 ebook pages. On average, there are about 300 words per page in a book. Before diving into the specifics of genrebased word counts, lets look at the broader picture of average book length. What isnt often considered is the sheer number of words a person who reads the entire series consumes. Based on this list compiled by nicole humphrey cook. Within the publishing industry we tend to talk about the length of a book in words. To fill a page in word, you would need around 500 words, 1. So 50,000 words is the minimum for a nonfiction book. You can sign in to give your opinion on the answer.

If you figure an average of about 250 words per page, then what about 60,000 words or so for an average book. How many words per page are there in a typical novel. Frequently asked questions getting published meg cabot. May 11, 2009 word count and book length one of my biggest problems as a publisher is having authors deliver more than was agreed to. Word count for famous novels organized commonplace book. By 2017, however, that number has dropped to 273 pages. I heard 10,000 words can be accepted as an ebook at a short length at least for nonfiction. Oct 10, 2016 most of the data ill be using throughout this article was sourced from writers digest and the manuscript appraisal agency, with any differences split to find the average.