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

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.