Words Count

Words in novels add up to something. They always do. They add up to word counts.

Looking over three random pages in a random paperback, I counted 270 words on the first sample, 278 on the second, and 277 on the third. The average word count per page was 275. Looking at five random paperbacks, I found they had 360, 332, 394, 327, and 372 pages each -- an average of 357 pages per book.

Multiplying 275 (average words per page) by 357 (average pages per paperback) gives me the average number of words for the five randomly-selected 'typical' paperbacks: 98,175.

Checking my Word document, I see I have approximately 9,600 words down. If I want a word count somewhere around 99,000, I should keep my telling of the tale to about 100,000 words. This gives me around 1,000 words to delete on revisions.

Dividing 100,000 by 9,600 gives me 10.42 (approximately).

So what does this all mean?

It means I'm 1/10th of the way to the finish line. Were I running a marathon rather than writing a book, I would be a mere 2.16 miles away from the start line, with about 23.6 miles ahead of me.

That's not the way I see it though. It isn't a chore, writing this book. I just have to know exactly how long the runway is so I can get this one away successfully and get on to the next one....