“How Many Pages is Your Book?”
Ah, the dreaded question. At least, it’s dreaded by me. Maybe you aspiring writers out there haven’t been asked this question yet, but as soon as you complete writing a manuscript and tell someone about it, you certainly will be.
Why is it dreaded, you non-writers may ask? Because it’s completely meaningless. Why, you continue to ask, like Mindy from Animaniacs? Let me explain.
Obviously, I can tell you exactly how long Cloud Bear is. It’s 244 pages. What’s that? You just read a physical copy of Cloud Bear, and it was 470 pages? Or, perhaps you read the e-book, and it was neither of those sizes? Silly, I was talking about the single-spaced, 12 point, Times New Roman manuscript.
Wait, so here we have three different formats, and three completely different page counts. So, which answer is right?
All of them. Meaningless.
It all comes down to formatting.
What someone wants to know when they ask me—or you— “How many pages is your book?” they essentially want to know how long it is, but don’t understand that “pages” is not a standard unit of measurement for books.
Every single book is formatted differently, from manuscript to publication. Margins, font size, trim size, line spacing, etc. all affect page number and change drastically from book to book. Most books that have a mass market paperback edition are also formatted differently in publication from hardback to paperback. When I was fourteen, my classmates and I couldn’t figure out why my Crossroads of Twilight had fewer pages than theirs. It’s because I had a hardcover, and they had a mass market paperback. It seems silly to think about now, but there you are.
Most people, when I try to answer this question, are not satisfied when I attempt to fob them off with, “It’s long.” I usually try to say, “It’s slightly longer than Pride and Prejudice,” or “It’s kind of like one and a half first Harry Potter books.” Now, to the uninitiated, it may be confusing where I got these answers when I just said page count is meaningless, so how do I know how long my book is compared to these two?
Word count. Word count is the standard unit of measurement between books. Now, it can be a bit difficult to find exact word counts online. Many sources will have slightly different word counts for the same book. However, from the most common numbers I can find for Pride and Prejudice and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone—yes, I will insist on using the American title; it’s what I grew up with—Cloud Bear is slightly longer than the former and slightly longer than one and a half of the latter.
In summary, the only sure way to know how long one book is compared to another is the word count. Number of pages means nothing, really. However, most non-writers don’t understand word count. It’s kind of like trying to tell someone who only uses Fahrenheit for temperature how warm it is in Celsius. A word to the wise—don’t bother to explain all this. I’ve tried, it’s just a headache. Just come up with something your average person will know the length of and compare your book to that. It works much better.
That being said, I understand if there are people in your life you would like to properly understand this issue, so if that’s the case, send them here. I’ve already done the work for you.