IIRC, 45K would still be in novella territory, 'novel' starts (as far as classification for Hugo/Nebula purposes) at 50K, though of course novellas may be sold as novels in slim volumes depending on the market/what the publisher thinks they can get away with. Most SF novels used to run 60K-75K, though currently the market seems to like 80-100K because it's thicker and readers ("consumers") like more heft for their $$$.

45K would be right on target for a Young Adult novel, the theory being that kids like shorter novels because they have less attention-span, which if you consider the popularity of Harry Potter seems pretty dubious.

And, goodness, Fay, you should write your own novel, and sell it, and become terribly rich.

Yes. Yes, I absolutely concur. Now all I need is a plot....

Theodosia, is that in plain text or as a word document? I only ask because I spend nearly as much time trying to work out how long a novel length is as I actually do typing, and this kind of number might help me stop that.

Theodosia, is that in plain text or as a word document?

....I don't understand what difference it would make.

t /stupid

I don't understand what difference it would make.

Well, for some reason Word files are much larger than plain .txt ones: my Spike-Giles-sumt-free-gay-vampire epic is 505KB in plain text, but 783KB in a Word file.

Word adds lots of stuff -- versioning, formatting, user info -- whether or not it actually looks flashy onscreen. So the files will always be larger than a text file.

And ita knows why there's a difference. But this is why there's a question about it.

Not K as in file size kilobytes.

K as in thousands of words.

Only ficcers and other online writers count it by file size-- because it's only relevant to the Internet, because then you have to worry about how large the file is you're downloading. Wordcount is a fair universial standard in actual publishing.

And a rough conversion: 100K of a .txt file is roughly (very roughly) 20,000 words, or so I found.

There's a whole rigamarole for determining word-length for type-setting purposes that professional editors use, which you really want to observe if you're submitting a manuscript, but it boils down to raw character count (spaces included) divided by 5, so that if you have a double-spaced manuscript page in Courier 12 point with a certain amount of margin at top, bottom and sides it will average about 250 words per page.

So, a 45K novella t opens calculator function will work out to about 180 pages in manuscript, which is a nicely hefty chunk o' paper.

(Note: paper size is American standard letter, but not too surprisingly, I haven't learned standard manuscript preparation for English editors, though I understand that the English editors are rather more used to getting "funny-sized" manuscript pages from Americans.)

t looks at above Er, yes, I do work for an actual publishing company (though far away from Editorial) and take a lot of this stuff for granted....