How Many Words Are in Your Book, and Why Everyone Asks

To find out how many words are in your book, open the file and look at the software's word count: in Word it's in the bar at the bottom of the window, in Google Docs it's under the "Tools" menu. That number is the first question you'll hear from editors, translators and printers, because it decides how long the work will take and usually how much it will cost too. It's worth knowing it before you reach out to anyone, and knowing exactly what goes into it.

How to count how many words are in your book

In Word. According to Microsoft's help page, the word count shows in the status bar, the thin strip at the bottom of the window. If it isn't there, go to the "Review" tab and choose "Word Count." If you select a passage, Word shows both how many words are in the passage and in the whole document.

In Google Docs. According to Google's help, open the "Tools" menu and then "Word count." Notice one detail: the count includes everything except headers, footers and footnotes.

If the book is in several files. Many writers keep each chapter in a separate file. That's fine, you just need to count each one and add them up. Or, and this is better, merge them into one file before anyone else gets the book. We wrote about that in preparing your manuscript file for translation.

Why words and not pages

It sounds natural to describe a book by pages. "I wrote a 250-page book." But a page isn't a fixed unit.

The same text in a large font, with wide margins and double spacing, can take up twice as many pages as in a small, tight font. A pocket-size print book will look longer than the same book in a large format. If you tell a translator "250 pages," they don't really know what they've got.

Words don't change. 70,000 words are 70,000 words in any font and any page size. That's why editors and translators both price and plan by words. And the reason the page count changes when a book is translated is explained in why the page count changes in translation.

What goes into the count and what doesn't

Before you send a number, it's worth thinking about what exactly you're counting. A few things people tend to forget:

• Footnotes. In nonfiction or a memoir with a lot of notes, they can be a big part of the text. Google Docs doesn't count them, and in Word it's worth checking whether they were included.
• The front and back pages. Dedication, acknowledgments, foreword, afterword, "About the Author." These need translating too. We wrote about them in front and back matter explained.
• Text inside images. A title on an illustration, a map with place names, a table pasted in as a picture. Software doesn't count this at all, and someone will still have to translate it.
• Old drafts. A chapter you deleted but left at the end of the file "just in case." If it's in the file, it's in the count.

The simplest way to avoid surprises: send the number along with a short sentence. "68,000 words in the body of the book, plus about 4,000 in footnotes, and there are three maps with text."

Why this number matters so much

Because almost everyone who works on the book after you plans by it.

An editor uses it to estimate how many weeks it will take to go through the book. A human translator translates a certain number of words a day, and that gives you the schedule. Most quotes for translation and editing are built per word, so two quotes for the same book can only be compared if both refer to the same number. For help with that kind of comparison, see how to compare two translation quotes.

The printer will want to know too. The word count, together with the page size and the font, decides how many pages the print book will have, and so also how thick the spine is.

Is my book too long, or too short?

Writers ask this a lot, and there's no single answer. What counts as long for a children's book is very short for a historical novel.

What can be said: the number shouldn't be the reason to change the book. If the publisher or editor thinks the book is too long, they'll tell you where. And if you're considering translation, a long book just means more work, not a less suitable book.

More questions about getting a book ready for translation are waiting in our FAQ.