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Itâs pretty hard to come up with a hard and fast rule, even if you know the font, the point size, the margins, and the page size.
I decided to check on some relatively comparable books from my imprint, and I was surprised at what I found.
I checked four books created with the same interior design, which uses Minion Pro 10pt for the body font with a 7.5x9.25 page size.
word count page count words per page
37,000 180 205
59,000 260 227
84,000 306 274
158,000 445 300
So, you can see the words/page varies a fair amount, but it is relatively consistent that the number of words/page goes up as the number of words goes up (probably because the impact of the front and back matter on the calculation gets smaller as the book gets bigger, and, at least for us, the front and back matter are less dense in words).
Our books have a fair number of programming examples, which are sparser and which you probably donât have in a biography. That and the number of figures probably makes our books longer than yours is likely to be.
So, Peter Neilsonâs estimate, based on numerology:-), may not be too far off, though I wouldnât be surprised if it's a bit longer.
Also, if this is in Word, you might, as an experiment, change the page size, font size, and font to what you plan to use, and see what happens. It will be approximate, especially if youâll be doing the book production in InDesign or some other formatting tool (Iâve seen books lose more than 10% in page count from formatting and copy editing), but it might be closer than youâd think.
Best regards,
Richard Hamilton
-------
XML Press
XML for Technical Communicators http://xmlpress.net
hamilton -at- xmlpress -dot- net
> On Jun 30, 2020, at 15:51, Marguerite Krupp <mkrupp128 -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
>
> I'm editing a biography that runs to just over 350 pages in manuscript
> form, including Endnotes and Index. It's currently in 12-point Times New
> Roman font with a 6.5" line length. It runs about 89,000 words. My author
> is trying to figure out how many pages that would be in a standard- size
> 7.5" x 9.0" or 7.5" x 10.0" (or other standard-size) book.
>
> Does anyone have any formulas or guidelines that would help in this
> calculation? I'd appreciate any help you could give.
>
> Thanks,
> Marguerite
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