Calculating Word Count
A question from one of my clients: “I’ve read so many ways of word counting, what way would you recommend? The one I use is one by Chuck Rothman which counts spaces and not just words. It gives larger word counts, but his point was that’s how publishers want it, as it more accurately represents their actual page count. What is your advice?”
I read through Rothman’s explanation and, yes, I know about this method, and I’ve used it myself, but that was back in the days B.C. (before computers). It isn’t so much that he counts the spaces between words as much as he calculates for the overall space the entire piece will take up in print. Okay, the theory still sounds great … it makes sense … but I just don’t recall any recent publisher’s guidelines that I’ve seen recently requiring that method.
My advice on marketing is to pay strict attention to the specific guidelines of each publisher or agent you submit to. Each has their own quirks–oops, I mean requirements–and following them to the letter (or space!) will give you an edge on the competition: writers who didn’t pay attention. I’ve seen lots of different specific requirements: fonts, sizes, spacing and file formats.
I don’t recommend even thinking about any of that until you are ready to actually send the manuscript off. What is important at our stage is to get the story “right on” in itself. The reformatting is a breeze by comparison. And if no method of word counting is detailed on a publisher’s guidelines, when it comes time for you to market, you might want to use this method for Rothman’s key reason: you get a larger word count, hence more money!
In the meantime, I accept MSWord’s automated count. And I rather expect that most editors, agents and publishers do, too, unless they specifically state otherwise. To use that method, just click on Tools in the top toolbar, and then Word Count. The total words, characters, etc. will be shown. If you want to know the wordage of just a certain section, like a paragraph, first highlight only that paragraph and then click on Tools and Word Count.