Word and Page Counts

Recently, I had a reader and aspiring writer (presumably) ask me about the page counts of my books as they existed in the drafting stage. I love these sorts of questions, mostly because I’m a nerd about statistics like this. I’m not sure why.

Anyway, I decided the best way to answer would be a quick blog post. The question, while simple, requires some conditions for the answer to make accurate sense. Pagination–as in the way the document is formatted–has an impact on page counts. This is why most people in the pub biz refer to books by length of word counts. Word counts are universal across pagination. That said, the specific pagination layout I use while drafting is this:

• Double spacing
• 1 inch margins
• .5 inch paragraph indents
• Times New Roman, 12 point
• 4 paragraph returns at the start of each chapter
• Orphan/Widow control turned off

With this pagination applied, I’ve listed the page counts for all of my books below These are the counts just prior to copy edits. I didn’t give copy edit counts because that is the stage when the publisher imposes their own pagination onto what I use while drafting. I’ve also included the word counts, because really, that will prove more useful to you in the long run.

• The Nightmare Affair, 304 pages, 85,000 words
• The Nightmare Dilemma, 362 pages, 102,000 words
• Avalon, 368 pages, 100,500 words
• Polaris, 370 pages, 106,000 words
• Proxy, 72 pages, 20,000 words (note, this is a novella)

There you have it. I could provide you all kinds of analysis on the variation you see there, such as the reason why Avalon’s page count is higher than Dilemma‘s even though Dilemma is actually longer (answer: this mostly has to do with chapters lengths. Avalon has shorter chapters), but I don’t really have the time. In case you’re wondering, I’m hard, hard at work on the third book in the Arkwell Academy series. Maybe soon I’ll get to post those numbers as well.

Happy writing!

p.s. Be on the lookout for the Polaris cover reveal happening in the next week or so!