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

[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.