word counts and other stuff

[nephele]

How, exactly, do you determine the word count for a manuscript? This seems to remain one of the huge mysteries of the publishing industry. And I'm going to tell you right here and now that you're going to get a different answer from virtually every person you ask. We at TKA tend to submit in Times New Roman, 12 pt., double spaced, and for the word

Comments

Another little complication

[dsgood]

No two word processors, or text editors with word counting features, will come up with the same total for the same text. Nor will specialized word count programs agree with any of them, or with each other.

No math, but...

[puzzlehouse]

When I first started doing layout for a short-story magazine, I tried jumping through the math hoops, but no two stories were ever alike (and no two authors ever used the same calculation). Some authors, knowing we had a 6000-word limit, just lied outright and claimed a 7900-word story was "6000 words (approx)."

I eventually developed my own no-math method: I'd drop each story into its own individual layout -- coded "R17 Star Wars_Lucas_.5" or "L22 Hobbit_Tolkien_full" or whatever, so I'd know at a glance in my pending folder whether a story started on a left or right page (verso/recto), how many pages it would take up in the layout, and how much space was left for an ad. Once I had all the various bits in hand -- stories, front and back matter, ads, illos, etc. -- I could whack the whole thing together in a single day -- with no math and no headaches.

Save a production editor's sanity -- just use Word's word-count and round up.