Word and page count
Words, characters, sentences and reading time — and how many printed pages your manuscript makes at the trim size you plan to publish in.
Words to pages, at a glance
Printed pages for common manuscript lengths on a 6 × 9 inch page, including front matter and twenty chapter openings. "Standard" is 11pt type at ordinary margins, "generous" is 12pt with more air, "large print" is 16pt. Your own book will differ — dialogue-heavy prose runs longer, because a short line of speech still costs a full line of the page.
| Words | Standard | Generous | Large print |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20,000 | 80 | 104 | 162 |
| 50,000 | 160 | 218 | 366 |
| 70,000 | 214 | 294 | 502 |
| 80,000 | 242 | 332 | 570 |
| 100,000 | 294 | 410 | 704 |
| 120,000 | 348 | 486 | 840 |
How long is a famous book?
Length is easier to judge against something you have read. These are the landmarks the counter above compares your manuscript to, in words — the figures are widely-cited approximations, and they vary by edition and by how the counting is done.
| Work | Author | Words |
|---|---|---|
| The Gettysburg Address | Abraham Lincoln | 272 |
| The Raven | Edgar Allan Poe | 1,100 |
| The Declaration of Independence | the Second Continental Congress | 1,320 |
| I Have a Dream | Martin Luther King Jr. | 1,667 |
| The U.S. Constitution | the Constitutional Convention | 4,543 |
| The Communist Manifesto | Marx and Engels | 11,468 |
| The Legend of Sleepy Hollow | Washington Irving | 12,200 |
| Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde | Robert Louis Stevenson | 25,600 |
| The Remains of the Day | Kazuo Ishiguro | 31,707 |
| The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | 48,400 |
| The Picture of Dorian Gray | Oscar Wilde | 78,700 |
| Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone | J.K. Rowling | 82,839 |
| 1984 | George Orwell | 88,000 |
| The Hobbit | J.R.R. Tolkien | 95,400 |
| Little Brother | Cory Doctorow | 104,600 |
| Ready Player One | Ernest Cline | 137,962 |
| Project Hail Mary | Andy Weir | 152,426 |
| Dracula | Bram Stoker | 161,100 |
| Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | 177,899 |
| Dune | Frank Herbert | 187,200 |
| Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows | J.K. Rowling | 203,217 |
| The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams | 278,980 |
| A Game of Thrones | George R.R. Martin | 298,000 |
| Les Misérables | Victor Hugo | 560,300 |
| The King James Bible | many hands | 783,137 |
How long should your book be?
Word count is the first thing an agent looks at, and the number that decides what your book costs to print. These are the ranges the trade expects.
| Category | Usual range |
|---|---|
| Picture book | 500–1,000 words |
| Chapter book | 5,000–12,000 words |
| Middle grade | 30,000–55,000 words |
| Young adult | 55,000–80,000 words |
| Novella | 17,500–40,000 words |
| Commercial or literary novel | 80,000–100,000 words |
| Epic fantasy or historical | 100,000–150,000 words |
| Memoir | 70,000–90,000 words |
| Non-fiction, general | 50,000–80,000 words |
Questions
- How many words is a typical novel?
- Adult commercial and literary fiction usually lands between 80,000 and 100,000 words. Under 60,000 a publisher will call it a novella; over 120,000 an agent will ask you to cut unless you are writing epic fantasy or historical, where 150,000 is normal. Middle-grade sits at 30,000 to 55,000, young adult at 55,000 to 80,000, and a romance category title at 50,000 to 70,000.
- How many pages is 50,000 words?
- At a standard trade paperback setting — 11pt type, 6 by 9 inches, ordinary margins — 50,000 words comes to roughly 160 printed pages including front matter and twenty chapter openings. Set more generously at 12pt it reaches about 218 pages, and as large print it passes 360. Use the calculator above for your own figure.
- Why does the page count change with trim size?
- A page holds a number of lines, and a line holds a number of characters. Both are set by the page's dimensions, its margins, the type size and the leading. A 5 by 8 inch page at 10pt holds far more words than an 8.5 by 11 at 16pt, so the same manuscript can differ by a factor of three between the two.
- How accurate is the page estimate?
- It is an estimate, and named as one. It uses the same page-capacity model Nueel uses before pagination runs: text area divided by leading gives lines per page, and the measure divided by average character width gives characters per line. What it cannot know is where your illustrations fall, how long your chapters are, or how much of your book is dialogue — dialogue sets far shorter lines. Expect it to be within about five percent on ordinary prose.
- Does Microsoft Word count words the same way?
- Almost. Word counts a hyphenated compound as one word, as this does, and both count a number as a word. Small differences show up around em dashes, ellipses and footnote markers. Across a manuscript the two are usually within a fraction of a percent of each other.
- How long will my book take to read?
- The reading time above assumes 238 words per minute, the median for adult silent reading of prose measured across a large body of studies. Speaking time assumes 130 words per minute, which is the pace of an audiobook narrator or a careful reading aloud.
Now make it the book that count describes.
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