Kopek Publishing, home of Kopek the Destroyer by Phil Owens

Home

Article - How many words on a Page

This is probably one of the most common questions asked by new authors. The next one is how many pages, or words, in an average book. Two of these questions are meaningless, without some qualifying information.

How Many Words on a Page
This is going to depend on:

What the font size is
What the font is
What the page size is

Font sizes range from a miniscule 6pt to a rather large 14pt, and on. The sizes at either end of this scale are usually reserved for specialist books, academia uses a smaller than average size, whilst books for the partially sighted use the largest. An exception to this, is books for children. Early age books again use a larger than normal font size.

Font size in itself is a rather confusing subject, because that generally depends on the actual font. For instance a Times New Roman font size of 10, is a lot larger than a Bookman font size of 10. A note on fonts. If you are planning an ebook, then by all means use the Times New Roam, and Aerial fonts, but nothing screams "Self Published" louder than seeing these fonts on paper. As a rule, if you pick a font with 'Book' in it's name, you should be safe. Chapter headings are another thing altogether, these can be whatever font you want, although I'd personally steer clear of anything too distracting. Whilst you want something eye-catching, you don't want something that takes the reader away from your story.

How Many Pages, or Words in a Book
Again, this is a subjective question, as it depends on the above being answered. Looking at it from the converse, then we can probably work out what font size to use.

Type Words Pages

Short Story 2,500 to 5,000 10 to 20

Novelette 7,000 to 25,000 30 to 100

Novel 35,000 to 80,000 140 to 320

Novel - Saga 75,000 to 150,000 300 to 600

For normal paperback books, the 70,000 word mark is the normal, anything less would have to be priced accordingly. For instance my book has 139 pages and is priced at Ł6.98 retail. This is a problem with POD, as it tend to be more expensive than traditional publishing, and therefore it is easy to price yourself out of the market.

OK, so let's take an 80,000 word novel, with 320 pages. That would work out at 250 words per page. This is probably on the low side, most novels these days have around 350 words on the page. When I say most novels, I'm talking about the usual sized ones that fill the bookshelves in your local Waterstones.

So to summarise. An average novel has about 70 to 80,000 words, it also has about 350 words per page, on average. So it should be about 220 pages long.

Since February 2009