In days of yore, the accepted rule for estimating word count was 250 words per manuscript page. Is that still the case today? If not, how should it be done instead?
A reader writes to ask: I'm getting close to done writing a manuscript, set to your specs for 250 words per page, and it's threatening to break 600 manuscript pages (about 150k, assuming no half-pages). That's going to be a heavy stack of paper
I wrote the original version of my manuscript formatting guide in 1993, modeling it after a much older two-page guide I received from Damon Knight in 1985. Back in those days, even for those who'd made the switch to composing prose on computers, the goal of formatting was
A reader writes to ask: I am submitting a short story collection, but the publisher requests just the first 50 pages. How do I handle this in terms of what I would write for word count? Do I include the number of words in first 50 pages? The entire manuscript?
A reader writes to ask: I read somewhere that if you format properly you should get 25 lines per page, but I consistantly get 24. So when I use Word to give me a word count on 141 pages, I get 28k, but when I do it the way I
A reader writes to ask: I've been speaking with an agent who has expressed keen interest in my sci-fi/humor novel, and what she's telling me is that while she really digs it, the manuscript is simply coming in too long for most publishers to take
A reader writes to ask: I've been writing a novel over the past year, and with the help on your site as well as a few other sites, I've been converting it into manuscript format. However, after having copied over the first two chapters, I'
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