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.

Ah. Yes, I was talking in terms of word count, not Kilobites. Presently 37,000 words.

I believe the cut off point from novella to novel is around 45,000? I think the NaNoWriMo target was 40,000, but I may be misremembering.

'Cause this baby isn't nearly finished yet, alas.

NaNoWriMo is 50K words.

Ah. So I'd have hit the target if I'd just written that extra 49,990 words, then? I thought it was only 39,990 I was short.

C'est la vie.

Surely it's more like 15K words?

[edit: Oh, never mind, you were talking about the November thing., not the current thing.]

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.

Huh. I've been hearing people say that with fiction you can now use Times New Roman and Word's word count function rather than ugly Courier font and the count estimate mentioned upthread. Must learn real answer soon. Would suck if lovingly researched and written Regency novel rejected for being the wrong bloody FONT.

FWIW, I've been told that you're already ahead of the game if all the words on the first page of the MS are spelled correctly. It seems best to give the editor as little reason to resist reading the MS as possible, so professional-style presentation (double-spacing more important than typeface, not a funny font, et cetera) with a header on each page (name, MS name, page #) is the most important element.

Editors are used to seeing MSs in Courier, which is monospaced and kind of ugly, but it's very reliable for technical reasons, and they don't see it as ugly. :-)

NaNoWriMo is 50K words.

Ah. So I'd have hit the target if I'd just written that extra 49,990 words, then? I thought it was only 39,990 I was short.

I ♥ Fay.