Quote:
Originally Posted by haertig
I don't understand why some people say it's difficult to provide a word count. That should be so trivial. Start with the first word of chapter 1, and end with the last word of the final chapter. Do not include anything else - no table of contents, appendix, preface, epilogue, etc. In some books the preface and epilogue are part of the story, but in other books, not so much. Too bad - "the standard" says they don't get included in word counts. If an author feels so strongly that they want to protest, just name them "Chapter One - Preface" and e.g., "Chapter 27 - Epilogue". Any word between chapter one and the final chapter gets counted - even if it's, say, a caption under a picture. Or even if the actual words are "chapter six". Whatever markup language is used to publish books these days is no doubt easily parseable for a very accurate computer-generated word count.
It really isn't difficult to come up with a reasonable standard - unless the point is to avoid a reasonable standard in the first place - which I'm guessing might be a big part of the problem. The authors/publishers don't want a standard so they can continue to dodge/manipulate specifying a word count that would be useful to consumers.
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I actually agree with this. I am boggled, daily, by the fact that when I ask people who call me what their word count is, almost none of them can tell me. They all use pages as their metric, which, to me, makes NO sense. I mean, 10 pages of 6pt Arial is different than 10 pages of TNR 12pt, right? Sheesh.
At my shop, we use SFWA numbers. {shrug}. Why fight it?
Hitch