A quick question for writers

[msagara]

I mentioned earlier that I have been using the equivalent of MS Word's wordcount while writing, and that this has not perhaps been very smart. I know that we're all looking at the lengths of our various books, and I was wondering: How do you keep track of wordcount while writing? Because I had an extra 45K words and an extra 25K words when looking at the page runoffs on the two books I did write in Scrivener, and this was ... unfortunate. And I would like not to repeat it if I can*.

If you need to turn in a 100k manuscript--or a manuscript of a specific maximum length--do you check the runoff count as part of your daily writing, do you format it in manuscript format so you write -to- a runoff count?

ETA: * I am aware that there might be a bit of gentle mockery at this point

Comments

[brigidsblest.livejournal.com]

I mentioned earlier that I have been using ...MS Word's wordcount while writing, and that this has not perhaps been very smart.

Er...why? That's what I've been using.

[msagara.livejournal.com]

In the current publishing clime, shorter books are preferable. Longer books cost more to produce for a variety of reasons.

Let's take a hypothetical: Publisher A wants a maximum, absolute maximum of 300k words. These would be runoff or castoff pages, not MS word.

If I use MS Word counts, and I finish the book at 300k by MS Word, I may think I have managed to squeak under the limit. This limit would in theory be 1200 pages in manuscript format.

But when I format the novel word says is 300k words for actual submission, my page count will be 1375 pages. Which means I will have gone over the acceptable upper limit by 175 pages. Which means in theory that I have to lose 175 of those manuscript pages to stay within the upper limit.

Does that make more sense?

If I'm writing 100k MS Word wordcount words, and the upper limit is 120k words, there shouldn't be a problem. It's when I'm writing 125k wordcount words, and the upper limit is 125k castoff words that I'm suddenly looking at having to lose 100 pages.

So what I'm trying to do is figure out what the rough castoff count is as I'm writing, and at the moment, a program which does a huge number of things I really, really value doesn't page count that way.