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

[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!