Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
It is a legacy of the magazine days when an issue would feature a fix quota of short stories, articles, and novelletes, and either a novella or a serialized novel.
Here's a slightly different take:
http://www.fictionfactor.com/articles/wordcount.html
When it comes to fiction ebooks the whole word count thing is becoming irrelevant and we're seeing a breakdown of the categories into (mostly) short-stories and novels, with bigger novels (100K+) no longer scaring anybody.
(And, of course, with ebooks page count is meaningless to start with). |
...which is why word count is MORE relevant than ever, really. (and should definitely be disclosed on any ebook's info page, same as page count for bound books)
EDIT: Oh, and
http://www.sfwa.org/2005/01/what-is-a-word/ for a decent definition of 'word' and how to count them. Had to find it in the Talk page of Wikipedia's word count article because, for some reason, no attempt at a definition was included. :P