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....

Not K as in file size kilobytes. K as in thousands of words.

Sometimes I can be increadibly dense. Thanks, RL.

100K of a .txt file is roughly (very roughly) 20,000 words

Thanks.

So... I'm the only one who, when I was 14, typed one entire page of a favorite novel into a computer to find out how much of a standardly-formatted 8.5 x 11 page it took up?

Just me, then. Never mind; move along. (It was about 2/3 of the page, at 1.5 spacing. Double-spacing drives me wild from a miserly standpoint, although I know from experience it's impossible to copyedit anything denser.)