I got a lot of feedback to my previous post about hitting the halfway point. Thank you all for your good wishes and support. Some of you had questions, and rather respond directly, I thought I’d post answers here for everyone to see.
How do I get my wordcounts? Well, early on, I was trained to do the old “250 words per page” method which has been the historic method of doing it. To get this, you write in Courier New 12pt font with 1” margins (I think) and you generally end up getting about 250 words per page. I actually still type in Courier because of this training. Then, you can just estimate word count by how many pages you’ve written. (And in this method, a “word” is being defined as around six characters, not an actual full word.)
The problem with this is that it’s not really that accurate. People’s computers, for some reason, often paginate the same document in different ways. Plus, I soon learned that not everyone does it this way. (And not everyone likes to write/read in Courier.) The longer I’ve been working in publishing, the more I’ve had editors and publishers just say “Use the Wordcount function on word processor.” So that’s actually how I go about it. Easy and simple, though it has its own problems (it counts actual words, not number of characters, so a person who uses a lot of big words can have a smaller wordcount than the size of the printed book would indicated.) Still, I think it’s consistent enough for my purposes. (Note that I got the wordcounts for the Wheel of Time books on the list from Wikipedia .)
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