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Q&A

Converting Word pages to book pages, for novels?

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The title says it all. How can I gauge how long my novel would be, if for example I've written 400 single-spaced pages of size 12 Times New Romans in Microsoft Word?

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The standard way of calculating word count, aside from simply using the "word count" feature of your word processor, is to format your document in standard submission format and then multiply the number of pages by 250. This is the technique that was used back in the days before computers could instantaneously count the number of words in a document. It also has the incidental advantage of accounting for the actual length of your paragraphs on the page, so that long passages of dialogue (which consist of lots of short paragraphs) or lists are correctly adjusted for.

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It also would depend on dialogue I think. I pulled out a book last night that had 4 novels in one. Page size was around 8x10. I looked up the first novel and the original paperback had 200 pages. In the version I had in the bigger format it was type set on 90 pages.

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I cheated once: I pulled a book off my shelf and recreated it (in InDesign, but you might be able to do it in Word). Page size, margins (I used a ruler), font, type size, everything. Once I recreated what was on the page, I had a gauge for size. Then I dumped my current work into that, and I had a rough idea of how long my "novel" was.

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