Word count

This just in…

February 22, 2010

My manuscript is complete! Ready for submission! Word count: 83,500 Microsoft Word pages: 280 Chapters: 33 Time to write: 13 months Dance with me! C’mon, you know you want to.

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Writers' Roundup: January 29

January 29, 2010

I’m on a high, about to jump into my final round of revisions! But I’ll pause for a moment to compile some links for you from this week: The paradox of memoir, Ami Spencer writes, is the more personal details you reveal, the more readers will relate. Author James Patterson is a publishing machine. And […]

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Word count, with a little help from Amazon

January 18, 2010

Want more helpful tips on writing? Sign up for my free newsletter. Did you know Amazon.com has a new function that gives a word count for each book? (I did not discover this myself. Props to Suzanne for pointing it out.) This is awesome enough for me to get excited over. Why? Because it allows […]

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Word count update

January 7, 2010

I don’t usually post word counts, but several friends have asked recently how long my book will be. I just finished revising (and cutting) Parts I and II, and together they’re nearly 70,000 words. That’s 224 manuscript pages, double-spaced in Microsoft Word, Times New Roman font. Ideally, I’d like the manuscript to come in at […]

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A brief question on word count

June 6, 2009

Please indulge this word-count newbie for just a few moments. What should I use to determine word count? Is Microsoft Word’s word counter a good measure? Here’s why I ask: I’ve been told manuscript pages usually contain about 250 words per page. But I’ve got one-inch margins all around, and when I highlight a page […]

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Literary agent Rachelle Gardner addresses memoir

June 3, 2009

Memoir includes elements of both nonfiction and fiction, as I’ve discussed before on this blog. While literary agent Miss Snark calls it a pesky category buster, until today I was ready to call it the forgotten genre. Although literary agents seem eager to represent memoir, most don’t specifically address the genre or its submission guidelines […]

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Nixing page count, adopting word count

June 2, 2009

I hate word counts. The numbers mean nothing to me — How much is 10,000 words, anyway? It’s like describing the cost of dinner in Japanese yen, a currency I don’t understand. Word count is so useless to this newspaper journalist that when a magazine editor assigns one to my story, I immediately translate it […]

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