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silly questions

Just sat thinking, and wondered if there is an average number of words to a page, or pages in a chapter etc, a formula to go by as it were

told you it was a silly question.
 
Something like sixty characters per line and forty seven lines per page is what I set Word up for when checking my page counts.

Chapter length, that can be anything, I tend to divide on big events, one per chapter. Each chapter should be like the story, with its own story arc in my mind.

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Telcontar

Staff
Moderator
I remember reading one agent's blog that for paperback books the rule of thumb is each page ~= 250 words. I tried to do an estimate myself and got something more like 400 words per page.

And yes, as said above - chapter length is a crap shoot. Do whatever seems natural to you. If you want to keep them roughly uniform in length, go for it - but plenty of successful authors have widely varying chapter lengths. Pick a system and stick to it.
 
So far I'm ignoring anything except word count. Page count can vary with page size, font size, font choice, hardback, paperback, etc. There's "standard manuscript format" which ends up being about (I think) 250 words per page, but that has a lot more to do with printing. I don't really know how traditional book publishers handle it.

My chapters all fall between 3k and 6k words, with an average of about 4,800 (last I checked). A Game of Thrones was 293k words long with an average of about 4,000 words per chapter. How many pages that translates into totally depends on the factors I listed before.
 
Courier New 12 point double spaced is effectively 250 words per page. Not sure if it is still done that way, but any submission specification that uses it lets them know exactly how many pages in print your story will be by the number of pages it takes in that format.

Everything else is variable and usually based on your own preferences.
 

Ravana

Istar
Right–the publisher doesn't care how many words are actually there: what they need to know is how much space it's going to take up. Which is why you're supposed to submit in a monospaced font like Courier, 12 point, no justification. That way, they can just count the lines… and with double-spaced lines and one-inch margins, they don't even need to do that much, since they'll already know how many lines there are to a page. Of course, your manuscript doesn't need to be formatted this way until you submit it; with computers, it's easy enough to use whatever font and spacing you're most comfortable reading, and convert it at the end.

And, no, there's no "formula" for what you "ought" to do, in terms of chapter or other lengths. Apart from using divisions that make sense, at least. I've seen chapters that were almost ninety pages long (I remember that particular one, since it was also a single sentence… :p ); I've seen chapters that were so short more than one appeared on a page.
 
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SeverinR

Vala
Chapter is basically the telling of a scene, or sub scene, or a series of related(not necessarily unfortunate) events.

Wait...
Ravana? 90 page chapter...1 sentence?
 

Ravana

Istar
Yep. Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch. PoV character is sliding slowly into senile dementia throughout the book, with the lines of his internal monologue getting lengthier and less coherent as his thoughts tumble and blend ever more; the final chapter is a single eighty-something page run-on. One of the most effective "violations" of grammatical rules I've ever seen.

Just be sure to plan ahead if you ever read it.… ;)
 
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