How many words in a book?

[Desdichado]

How many words does a typical novel have? Any guideline on a words per page on average for a typical paperback?

I've heard that LotR is roughly a million words, so presumably each part is 300,000-350,000 words? At 300-350 pages (roughly) each part, that should come to about 1,000 words per page. Does that sound more or less reasonable, or way off?

 

[eabha]

That seems really high. Just did a quick word count of a page from Moby Dick and got around 380. I guess it depends on page and print size, though.

EDIT: A quick search and I found a website saying that Lord of the Rings has "more than half a million words." Makes the math work a bit better.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

For your first, shoot for 90,000. That's the length of a typical Star Trek novel or whatever.

 

[Desdichado]

Wow, that seems really low. I have an ebook/rtf copy of The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs, and it's got over 47,000 words and 69 pages in a word processor, which comes to just over 685 words per page on average. I'm guessing that formatting in an actual book fits more words on a page than a word processor, but I could be wrong. It does depend on the layout, font size, book size, no doubt.

Still, I'm trying to guess what a novel is in words. It seems reasonable, because The Face in the Frost is barely more than a novella at best, that an average novel of 300-350 or so pages is 200,000-300,000 words, or slightly more.

A Robert Jordan piece of the Wheel of Time has got to be 750,000 words or so, if that's correct. They clock in at over 900 pages.

 

[Desdichado]

D'oh! Seems I doubled my numbers. That does sound more reasonable. Shooting for more like 100,000 words instead of 200,00-300,000 for an average novel size sounds good.

 

[Byrons_Ghost]

Believe it or not, there's "official" literary word counts attached to the different forms of fiction:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=define%3ANovel

There's some gray area, obviously, but anything of 50,000 words or more is generally considered to be a novel. It's hard to estimate a page length for either word processor documents or printed books, since font, print, and page sizes can vary so much.

Off the top of my head, I think I've read before that Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is in the area where it could be considered either a novella or a short novel.

 

[Warrior Poet]

Just out of curiosity, why did you label this thread under the "Love" category?

Actually, maybe I don't want to know.

Warrior Poet

 

[Tewligan]

Just out of curiosity, why did you label this thread under the "Love" category?

Because when he says "book", he means "letter to Penthouse Forum".

 

[Desdichado]

Just out of curiosity, why did you label this thread under the "Love" category?

Actually, maybe I don't want to know.

Warrior Poet

Eh, it's not big deal. None of the other topic headings seemed to fit, so I just picked the most incongruous of them all.

 

[mojo1701]

Eh, it's not big deal. None of the other topic headings seemed to fit, so I just picked the most incongruous of them all.

I usually go for 'cool'. Like Shaft. Or Fonzie. Or both.

Come on, Yolanda, what's Fonzie like?