Support for Indie Authors discussion

In various places, like publication slips and publicity releases, I'm supposed to say how many pages my book has.

According to IngramSpark, it has 552 pages. That's reasonable, because they're counting everything in the book: title, copyright, map, dedication, story, etc. But the very last page of the epilogue says 542, because that's the number of pages in the story proper.

I assume I should list the latter: the length of the story itself. But does anyone know what's expected? Or is this a "Hmmm...doesn't matter, use whichever you want" situation?

The numbers are so close. Really, when a book is roughly 550 pages, no one's going to pay much attention if you're a few pages off. I'd probably go with 542 since that's how long the actual story is, but there's really nothing wrong with going with 552.

Fair enough. Thanks!

Use the page count of the story for press releases, publicity and requests for reviews. In your case that is 542,. You only need to worry about the actual physical count, 552 in your case, when setting up the graphics for a cover to calculate the spine width.

When someone looks at the book listing page on Amazon or a similar retail store, they will see the full page count, so that is what I use. There's no point in trying to explain why the numbers you are using don't match the number they see at the retailer site. They really don't care how much of it is front/back matter and how much of it is the story. They really don't.

I find a word count to be far more useful ...

P.D. Workman (Pamela) wrote: "When someone looks at the book listing page on Amazon or a similar retail store, they will see the full page count, so that is what I use."

Interesting, thanks. I hadn't thought of that.

Bruno wrote: "I find a word count to be far more useful ..."

I agree, it's a much better measure of the work's scale. A friend's book has almost twice as many words as mine, but only about 25% more pages—differences in formatting and prose structure, I assume. Unfortunately, a word count probably doesn't mean a lot to the typical non-author reader.

Bruno wrote: "I find a word count to be far more useful ..."

I agree. I now list the word count in the synopsis. It's a more accurate gauge. I had 2 books of a series and one with the lesser word count, but with a different format, showed a higher page count.

ADD: My stories are usually in ebook format.

In the mainstream publishing industry, the full page count of a book is used (warts and all) as it helps the buyers etc work out spine width, and therefore shelf space. They know they'll be able to fit X number of 400 page books on a shelf compared to X number of 600 page novels.

I agree that word count isn't necessarily going to be much use to a reader who doesn't know the ins and outs of writing a book. If I told most people I know that a book was 85,000 words long they'd probably have no clue but if I said it has 400 pages they'd understand better. The fact that several of those pages are title, copyright etc doesn't matter much over all as they are only a couple of pages here and there. I don't think I've ever seen a review for a book where the reader felt cheated because the 400 page book only contained 396 pages of story (though that's not to say there isn't a review like that out there!)

I would state the page count as it is given for the entire book, not just the story.

Andy wrote: "In various places, like publication slips and publicity releases, I'm supposed to say how many pages my book has.

According to IngramSpark, it has 552 pages. That's reasonable, because they're cou..."

What format is your book? For my e-books, I get the page count based on the book info after I uploaded to an self-publishing website or program. I assume they count all pages on my book. I assume the small difference in pages shouldn't matter.

John wrote: "What format is your book?"

Both print and eBook, though here I'm asking about print.

Since the book's size might put some people off, I like the idea of using a slightly smaller number if that's fair. Rationally, it makes no difference, but "under 550" might feel subtly more welcoming than "over 550". (If only I could drop 53 more pages and make it 499...)

But that's how many pages it takes to tell the story. I'm going to list the larger number, since it'll match whatever Amazon, B&N, etc. display. If somebody dislikes longer books, they'll run away screaming either way.

Thanks, everyone, for all the good advice.

Andy wrote: "...word count probably doesn't mean a lot to the typical non-author reader..."

True but the standard shorthand for converting word count to page number is ... WORD COUNT / 250 = PAGE COUNT.

So a 100,000 word novel would be approximately 400 pages.

Page count is really just an indicator for readers of how long the book is so they can judge how much time commitment they will need to invest. I can't think of anywhere that a specific count would be needed, except (as noted above somewhere) when calculating retail shelf space or when you're in the actual book formatting/printing stage. The cover designer, for example, needs a specific page count and page size to know how wide to make the spine. Other than that, page count doesn't really have to be so accurate.

And of course in eBook's it's totally meaningless since readers can alter the size of the font, and therefore the number of pages. In that case the WORDCOUNT divided by 250 estimate is perfectly fine.

First you need to understand "page count" is a statistic for books that is standardized to provide a single measure that can compare a book's "length" across all formats. It's handy to have such a thing; a 60,000 word book is the same reading "length" regardless of how many words fit on the print format's pages. Readers are interested in a meaningful page count when they assess a book. Not word count, which they don't have, though page numbers are provided in print editions. According to an author of "Self-editing for Fiction Writers," Dave King, who is a prolific, pro book editor, there is an industry standard statistic for conversion of word count to page count: page count = word count/250.

This is the stat that publishing pros will be using. So my book of 56,113 words is 225 "reading-time pages." Think it through and you'll see this makes so much sense when the literal, "real" page count is not even possible to determine with any variable ebook format. Yet this industry standard predicts what readers and authors really want to know; writing time and reading time. We can use this measure to nail down the actual parameter of interest, reading or writing time and effort.

That is really helpful information! I have found it difficult to determine and this makes sense. Thank you. Pia.

Jay wrote: "Page count? On what? If you read on your phone as I do there will be a lot more pages than if it's on a tablet reader."

Joseph wrote: "First you need to understand "page count" is a statistic for books that is standardized to provide a single measure that can compare a book's "length" across all formats."

I've resigned myself to the fact that many readers consider page count when deciding whether to even pick up a book—whether or not they'll be reading physical pages.

Unfortunately, that hurts me because of my writing style: short paragraphs and chapters = a lot of white space. My words-per-page is more like 210 than the "industry standard" of 250.

That's why I asked the question initially. I have a 550 page book that weighs in more like a 460 page book—a big book either way, but 500+ permanently removes some readers.

But...nothing I can do about it. Life goes on. 🙂

Perhaps all is not lost, yet.

Interesting issue but do you see that LARGER pages in the print edition would reduce the book's number of pages and thus the perceived reading time? If you had just one page the size of an Olympic swimming pool, all of your content would fit on it and your page count would be 1! So, what is the paper book format size (page length x width)? Can you recast that format to a larger page size? Maybe from 5x7 to 6x9, for example. How big would the pages have to be to get the page count down to a size you feel more comfortable with?

This should even affect how Amazon calculates your page count in the book's details page for the Kindle version, if you have one, which may be shorter than your print book anyway. They give a "print length" for one of my books of 97 pages for the Kindle edition but for the paper edition it's 152 pages on a 6x9 format because of big font and several illustrations. The difference is probably due to the squirrelly issue of how to calculate page count in ebooks that have variable page sizes. Magic, no doubt.

Another option is to reduce the font size to increase the words/page. If you fiddle with it you may get to a more comfortable place. Otherwise you're looking at making a big edit with deep text cuts but that might even make the book better. Just sayin'.

page count can be different depending on the formatting of the book. Book size for one: a 6" x 9" book would have a different page count than a physically larger or smaller format. Also, the formatting can have a small bearing on page count depending on your margins, page breaks, header, footer. I list the pages as story length and also add a word count

Doing better than me then, longest title written by me was 100 pages.

Joseph wrote: "Perhaps all is not lost, yet."

Dennis wrote: "page count can be different depending on the formatting of the book"

Thanks Joseph and Dennis. Somehow I missed your comments when you posted them.

The paperback is 5.5 x 8.5, and the hardcover is 6 x 9. Unfortunately, I'm not comfortable reducing the font size, since readability is just about right as it is.

However, most of the book's "chapters" are 2-3 pages long, so there's a ton of white space. I've considered running those together, and using section breaks instead of full chapter breaks. I just have to decide how that affects the reading experience.