Conversion of manuscript to actual printed page...

[Jamesaritchie]

[Jamesaritchie]

[deedee1]

My mistake. I didn't read the word-count closely enough. I saw 500+ pages and said "Whoa." I'd expect about 80,000 words for a first novel (or 320 pages). But as has been stated, this varies from one publisher to the next. I've read some great novels that were less than 60,000 words. Longer works are more difficult to sell, especially for first-time authors. That doesn't mean it can't be done, though. Like I said, if you feel strongly enough about the story length then I'd submit the manuscript.

Diana
www.DianaEstill.com

[JessicaLeigh]

Good news...one less thing to worry me.

[Jamesaritchie]

[Curious]

Part of this novel-length question may have been my fault. In an earlier thread where I talked about a manuscript of less than 100,000 words being "long," we were discussing a children's manuscript--a 9-12 or YA (teen) one. There, the word count drops. 50,000 is pretty normal for the 9-12 range. 70,000 is longish but okay for YA. 80,000 is long. 90,000 is LONG! Only J.K. can get away with those brick-sized beauties.

Clare

[Jamesaritchie]

[kdg2222]

I found a method on the internet that. The point, according to the website, is to allow publishers to estimate the page space a manuscript will take up. If this information is correct, the following method should work well.

1st Convert your entire manuscript to Courier, single space font.
2nd count the number of words in 10 lines then divide by ten to get the average number of words per line.
Then count the number of total lines possible on a given page. Multiply this number by the average number of words per line. This total will be the number of words per page.
Multiply the number of words per page by the number of pages to get the final word count for a manuscript.

When you use this method the total is very different than the total given by a wordprocessor.

[Jamesaritchie]