Counting Up Your Words

Most markets require that your manuscript be within a certain length as measured by the number of words. This is normally referred to as a manuscript's word count. There are two generally accepted ways to do a word count barring any special instructions set out in the market's guidelines: you can count the words or you can count the pages.

Counting the Words

One way to figure out your word count is to count each word in your manuscript. A word is considered to be six characters (five letters and a space). So, you can count the number of words in a line, then multiply that by the number of lines to a page, and then multiply that by the number of pages. This gives you the following equation:

Word Count =
(number of words per line) X (number of lines per page) X (number of pages)

You can also do an average if you want, especially if the page you pick happens to have either a lot of dialog, and therefore fewer words, or very little dialog, and therefore more words. You can find the average number of words per line, as well as the average number of lines per page and use those in the equation.

Counting the Pages

A quicker, and easier way to do a word count is to simply take the number of pages in your manuscript and multiply by 250. A formatted manuscript page (that's with a one inch border all around, double spaced, and 12 point Courier font) has about 250 words to it. If you have a fraction of a page, you can count the words for that page remembering that a word is considered 6 characters, or you can simply do a rough estimate of words. So, if you have about half a page, that would be about 125 words. If you have a third of a page, that would be about 80 words. This is the method that I use when I do my word counts.

Using Application Tools

Many word processing applications, such as Microsoft Word and Open Office Writer, can count the actual number of words in a document. Don't use these. The numbers they return are typically don't follow the industry "standards" as outlined above. For example, using the above methods for one of my stories yields a word count of 5750. Using Microsoft Word's Word Count feature gives me 4469.

Rounding

After you've found your word count, you should probably round it. Many guidelines may actually instruct you to round your word count to the nearest 10s or 100s. Editors, it seem, rarely want an exact number and at least one author points out that editors will eventually use their own methods for figuring your word count anyway. I generally round to the nearest 50. So if I end up with a word count of 1243, I say it's 1250. If I end up with a word count of 3221, I say it's 3200.

All of this means that as long as you're safely within the limits defined in your market's guidelines, don't sweat it. Just get your word count and be done with it. There are far more important things for you to worry about, like a good plot, proper spelling and grammar, and making sure you're sending your manuscript to the right market.

Wrap Up

This has been a brief look at the brief topic of word counts. The important thing to get out of this is that regardless of whether you count each word or multiply the number of pages by 250, all you really need is a good estimate. The market will take care of the rest for you. But remember to always follow any special instructions outlined in a market's guidelines, whether those instructions dictate industry "standards" or not.