Originally posted on my writing blog which was active from 2010 to 2018.
Since I’m an aspiring writer, I am intensely curious about some of the “inside baseball” facts of the books I read. A took a random selection of Kindle books (the ones that just happened to be on my hard drive at the time) and figured out the approximate word count for each book when converted to plain text.** In the table below, the number of pages is as shown by Amazon.
<td valign="top" width="209">
<em>Servant of a Dark God</em>
</td>
<td valign="top" width="82">
<p align="right">
179k
</p>
</td>
<td valign="top" width="74">
<p align="right">
624
</p>
</td>
Fred Saberhagen
<td valign="top" width="210">
<em>The First Book of Swords</em>
</td>
<td valign="top" width="82">
<p align="right">
85k
</p>
</td>
<td valign="top" width="74">
<p align="right">
219
</p>
</td>
I am not sure what is up with Terry Goodkind’s Kindle books, but they seem very screwed up. I’m pretty sure that book had more than 580 pages.
Another question that comes up among writers a lot is: How long should my chapters be? Obviously there’s no right answer, but here is how long the first three chapters (not counting prologues) are in the above books:
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