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.)

I'm trying to think how many standard novel pages 156,000 words would be. Not that I have any personal reason for knowing, or anything t /lie .

Everything submitted for publication in the humanities in the US has to be twelve-point Courier, double-spaced. I imagine it's the same for fiction, though you're much more likely to have an agent to tell you what the proper protocol is there.

Anne, IIRC, it's about 3/4s as many book pages as MS pages, on average, but type-setting can raise or lower that by quite a bit -- larger or smaller type, wider or smaller margins, spacing between lines, plus thicker or thinner pages. One of my friends had a work-for-hire novel cut down 1/3 by an "editor" (by excising whole chapters) when it turned out that the covers had been printed so that the spine was too thin to accommodate the originally intended page count.

(WFH novels will often be contractually obliged to be a fairly strict word count, i.e. if it says 60K, you turn in exactly 60K +/- 500 words, it is really the low end of the professional writing spectrum where you are providing "product" not lit.)

Longer novels are not nearly as hard to sell as they used to be, the readers seem to go enthusiastically for them if they're convinced it's going to be good value for the money, a real long read they can sink into, et cetera.