View Single Post
Old 06-16-2019, 02:27 PM   #28
Quoth
Still reading
Quoth ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Quoth ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Quoth ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Quoth ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Quoth ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Quoth ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Quoth ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Quoth ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Quoth ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Quoth ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Quoth ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Quoth's Avatar
 
Posts: 14,343
Karma: 105899727
Join Date: Jun 2017
Location: Ireland
Device: All 4 Kinds: epub eink, Kindle, android eink, NxtPaper
Only word count means anything about size. Also size only tells you if a short story, novella, novel or maybe epic (> 200,000 words). Size tells you nothing about quality. Also page count is irrelevant and always has been even on paper (size, margins, line spacing, font and font size).

I count from the first word of story to the last. I've stopped putting chapters labelled Prologue (because some seem to think this can be skipped or is a Preface) and Epilogue (because some people think it can be skipped or is like an Appendix).
I don't count Notes, Appendix, Blurbs, Contents, About <whatever>. Just the story. It's easy, though not 100% accurate. I round down as I am too lazy to select all the chapter headings and subtract. Some books don't have chapters (see many Terry Pratchett Discworld) and others don't put the word 'Chapter'. I save, I select in front of first Chapter and at the end of last Chapter and click "Word Count". I write that on a piece of paper, go back to end of Copyright section and type in the word count.

Quote:
10,000 words or fewer is normally thought of as a short story; then there's a wide grey area and you have the novelette, or novella (both words diminutives of "novel") of 20,000-40,000 or a bit more, and then you blur into novels. But there are no hard-and-fast boundaries.
Agreed, there are no definite boundaries. 1,000 words is certainly a short story. About 25,000 is a novella. Roughly 40,000 to 120,000 is a typical novel. But the boundaries are not agreed or clear.
In reality "genre" is a publisher invention too. Certainly some stories are obviously Detective, Romance, Adventure, Erotic, Space Opera, SF, Fantasy etc. But this is a more modern distinction and SP or indie fiction may not have as clear genre boundaries.

Last edited by Quoth; 06-16-2019 at 02:37 PM. Reason: how I count
Quoth is offline   Reply With Quote