Character counts, word counts, signatures, and spine sizes.

[alg]

Today at the dentist, I had a different dentist who was hideous to me, and I went back to the office in tears. Luckily, I work with people like pnh and tnh and claireeddy, and they took excellent care of my emotional and physical state.

I have a long list of things to do, but first I am going to give you some information.


How to do a Castoff -- A step-by-step guide to getting an accurate character count -- and how to estimate how long your manuscript will be as a bound book!



I hope you guys will now relax a little bit about how to do a character count, and also how the length of print books get figured out. No more sitting up nights, rocking back and forth, muttering to yourself and biting your nails because you can't remember how many pages are in a signature or what front matter is! Anna to the rescue!

Comments

[deviantauthor.livejournal.com]

*sends smite vibes to the ass hat dentist*

Hope you recover soon. Enjoy your supper.

*goes to wait patiently for Robot Cheerleader Wars*

Ask Anna!

[sylviavolk2000.livejournal.com]

Wow, and you said once we could find information like this by googling? Well, true, you said that about another post entirely, but I've googled, and I've never found as much good info as you're giving us.

Really, there are mss formating instructions online, but they never ever ever never seem to explain their whys as well as their what-you-dos. Thanks!

[tharain.livejournal.com]

::Brain fuses at the high math::

I'll do it when I'm finished with the words.

And I'm writing abook with LBGT characters, but as I'm a complete neophyte, I've no information to add to your post, I fear.

[azang.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing all of that very cool info. You're wonderful!
Sorry the dentist was a jerk. I've run into so many bad doctors that I wish I could brand them with a warning label. At the end of the day, his negativity will catch up with him. His karma will run over his dogma and he'll be the one crying.
Check out brentsbrain for LBGTQ. He is the author of GEOGRAPHY CLUB, ORDER OF THE POISON OAK and others. He's a really sweet guy, I'm sure he would talk you.
Angela

[rogue-poet.livejournal.com]

Amazingly I was not scared by the math. You make is sound so easy. I almost wanted to do that to my own MS... almost.

Well, maybe tonight, after the kids are asleep I'll sneak downstairs with a pocket calculator... no, that way lies madness... madness I tell you! Aaiiyyeeeee!!!!

[chickwriter.livejournal.com]

Hey there, I'm probably doing a totally blank brained thing - but I can't seem to e-mail you via LJ. (alg @ livejournal.com got bounced) :(

I have a bi character in my first book and wanted to send you the reactions, etc.

Okay to post here? Or I can e-you privately - whichever is best.

Cheers.

mylima @ Gmail.com is my addy

[kchew.livejournal.com]

I hated doing castoffs. I always had long, long, academic manuscripts to deal with that had footnotes and bibliographies. Those were always in a different type size than the rest of the manuscript. We picked three pages per chapter, counted three representative lines,
and did this for the whole manuscript.

The positive thing was that we usually used the same typeface, so I was able to plug all my
precious little numbers into a spreadsheet that Production provided to us. Bing! Insta-page length estimate.

I was usually over on my castoffs, but having a book come in short wasn't a bad thing for us. I'd much rather be over, and have the bottom line improve, than be under, and have
people yell at me about how the bottom line was disappearing.

Bah. Castoffs. Something I'd forgotten about having to do!

[kchew.livejournal.com]

Forgot to add: the most scar-inducing part was when the authors, who were supposed to deliver the manuscript with endnotes, gave me footnotes. Then I had to count the footnotes, line by line, and then cast them off as though they were another chapter or so in order to have a proper count. When there are literally thousands of lines of footnotes, you tend to think improper thoughts about your authors.

Thought I was over it. :)

[kate_nepveu]

I once converted endnotes in Word to footnotes in WordPerfect (including the automagic codes to make the footnotes refer back to other footnotes/pages by number). Which was hideous.

And then the author *kept sending me line edits every single day*, which needed to be hand-entered *by me*, because otherwise I'd have to run the conversion all over again!

(This was for a law review article.)

Sorry, bad flashback there. In short: authors getting the footnote/endnote thing wrong: very bad for so many reasons.

[kchew.livejournal.com]

Oh God. All you had to say was Word to Wordperfect and I started to hyperventilate. A few years ago, I had a copyeditor do an onscreen edit in Word (normally we did copyedits on paper, but we had six weeks cut from our production schedule, and so on, editorial and production heroics ensue). I then sent the file to the author, who swore he had Word and could work on the files, but said that he liked Wordperfect better. He then decided on his own that he didn't want to use Word, because he hardly ever did, converted everything to Wordperfect, did his changes, and sent it back.

All the changes...his, the coypeditor's...were in green. And permanent. I couldn't tell what he'd done, and what the copyeditor had done, or go back and undo anything to figure it out. And...to make a long story short, I had to do a very long, onscreen comparison of files and make everything work by hand, so we could keep the production schedule.

And yes, he was the sort of person who was sending me line changes every single day too, and darned snarky about it because in the middle of this he went on vacation where he could not be reached by phone, fax, or email without prior arrangement. He is on my Black List Forever.

Word/Wordperfect conversions...shudder. Shudder, shudder. Bad flashback empathy.

[kate_nepveu]

Oh, gawd, no, I was wrong, it was WordPerfect to *Word*. Wow, I'd blocked out more than I'd thought of that episode.

Going to WordPerfect at least gives you "reveal codes" so you can see what kind of weird formatting has been imported. Going to Word . . . *shudders*

[burger-eater.livejournal.com]

No tag on this one. Shouldn't this be part of your demystifying publishing series?

[hoosier-red.livejournal.com]

This was fascinating -- thanks for posting it! And I suggest hiring someone large and foul-tempered to go have a little chat with that dentist -- sounds like the one I had who tried to give me a root canal on one shot of novocaine. Feh.

My sympathies

[rivertess.livejournal.com]

Dear Anna --- I sooooooo sympathize with you over the dentist ordeal. I haaattteee going to the dentist, which I believe I have mentioned before! I hope that you find a better, nicer, cooler, no pain dentist who will bow down before the Fairy Queen and give her the respect she deserves!!

Re: My sympathies

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I have the coolest dentist in the world, but he's all the way over here in California. He reads science fiction and he puts technology all over his face like a Borg and he makes your crown with a digital thingy and a little automagical three-dimensional lathe machine. He's a surfer, too, and rides his bike to work, but that's just regional details. And he gives the anesthetic in three parts, three different drugs, so it really doesn't hurt.

[aulus-poliutos.livejournal.com]

I've only published academic non fiction and a short story so far, but I have some gay characters in my NiPs (epic historical fiction, late Roman Empire setting). In one book there's a male rape scene (though the MC is not gay) and in another one of the MCs is gay, and I'm going to have sex scenes - two or three - that are relvant for character development and plot.

I got different advice from, "that's really tricky to sell because WalMart doesn't store gay character books" (which made me combine the words fuck and Walmart in one sentence) to, "write what you want, and btw, most publishers won't have a problem with it." Which is what I do. *grin*

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

Two things.

I pre-queried (now there's a bizarre one, I suppose) before settling in to write, and all three agents wrote back to say that the lead's sexual orientation wasn't nearly as important as whether it's a readable, quality story. Granted, this is hardly the word of a published author, but it is what agents came back at me with. Grain of salt, as always.

Everytime I do word-count thingies, I despair. I need to stop writing doorstops. Sigh. I've always wondered: if an editor likes a story, is the high word count an automatic killer, or might an editor suggest ways to slice the word count and thus make the book more marketable? (Yes, I know fantasy can carry a larger word count, but even so, 156K is large, I'm told.)

I've always wondered & never knew who to ask--but then along came Anna! ...Woot.

[aulus-poliutos.livejournal.com]

I hear you on the 150K is large thing. Judging from the outline/written chapter length-relation mine will clock in at that range as well.

Seems I can write less than 3K or more than 150K but not in between. :)

[sarahtales.livejournal.com]

What a great post, but my poor darling, I am so sorry about the dentist, and not knowing before! Command me as you will.

[alg.livejournal.com]

Oh, my sweet cabbage! I was fine last night, and I am fine now -- it was only an hour or two when the dentist was poking the hurt bit that I was upset. You are a dear. I cuddle you!

[the-lady-m.livejournal.com]

I've just realized why you are an editor and I am a writer in training.

That was so mathematical that my head decided to spin around a few times and green spew just ejected all over the walls... :P

[tnh.livejournal.com]

Five frontmatter pages is six frontmatter pages, because the main text has to start on a right-hand (recto) page.

(One of my authors asked me in chat what recto and verso were. "The bloody inside and hairy outside of the calf," I replied.)

However, if an editor says there are five frontmatter pages, production will silently and automatically change it to six frontmatter pages; whereas if an editor has five frontmatter pages but says there are six because of that implicitly required blank verso, production may send them a memo asking for whatever text is supposed to go on that sixth frontmatter page.

[youngiskander.livejournal.com]

The demystifying publishing series is awesome. You rock.

I wondered about #14 in the castoff calculations: you ended up with a grand total of 267 pages, but went on to count signatures excluding the front and back matter and the chapter breaks. Is that an error, or is there some arcane reason for the exclusion?