Entry tags:
Character counts, word counts, signatures, and spine sizes.
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!
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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!
no subject
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.
no subject
Seems I can write less than 3K or more than 150K but not in between. :)