Manuscript Size and Word Count

Services for editorial work and layout are based on the number of words in the manuscript.

Most wordprocessors such as MS-Word have a built-in feature for counting words. As a quick approximation, one normal manuscript page has 500 words. (Normal manuscripts are written on the standard document size of 8.5" x 11". Differences in type-size, line-spacing, and margins, affect how many words are on a page, of course. So you might need to adjust the approximation.)  Page count in the finished book will be higher. See below.

If you know the page count, you can estimate the word count with the following calculator:

Something to remember—The number of pages in a manuscript likely differ from the number of pages in a finished book. Page count in a book depends on page size, number of photos, and other layout considerations. So later, in calculating the number of finished book pages, we come back to this first step, which is knowing how many words are in the manuscript.