There is a formula for determining word count. The good ole ‘word count’ button may be considered suitable in the future but, for now, at least, many publishers still use the tried and true 25-lines to a page method.

Why? Because there’s a difference in the way the computer determines what an average ‘word’ size is and the way the publishing industry determines it. One of the obvious reasons is that a computer would determine that a book has 5000 words wehtehr they were crammed together in one, single spaced block paragraph, or one word to a line.

Like this.

Which I like to do to make use of white space.

See?

White space mattters to publishers and a white-space heavy author (like me) will take pages longer to print their 50,000 words than an author who’s fond of tight, verbose paragraphs.

The 25 line per page method is not precise but it does give the publishers a good idea of how many pages your book will be (including all that blank space), and that’s what matters to them at the end of the day.

Setup for wordcount – 250 words per page

1. Take your correctly formatted manuscript and tweak your top & bottom margins until you have 25 lines on each page (including blank ones). Yes, count them the good old fashioned way.
2. Tweak the left & right margins until you have 60 characters to a line (including blank spaces).
3. 60 characters x 25 lines = 1500 characters divided by six characters (ie: the average ‘word’ size according to the publishing industry) = 250 ‘words’ per page
4. Multiply 250 by the number of pages in your MS (eg: 350pp x 250 words = 87,500 words); or, multiply by four to get 1000 words and then you just need to divide your MS by four as it grows to keep an eye on its length.