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

[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?