Ebooks: Word Count Vs. Page Count
TweetPosted By Scath on December 31, 2009
I just know Dhympna loves giving me posting fodder. Don’t ya? 
She made a comment on my last post:
To play devil’s advocate, I am sick and tired of epublishers charging 6 to 8 dollars for a 130 page novel. Some pubs do not list word counts and after I buy such a short book, I will admit that I feel cheated.
So would I, considering I can buy a physical paperback with over 400 pages to read for $8 or less!
The problem is that there’s not a standard page size used across the board when it comes to formatting ebooks. It’s all dependent on preference of the person formatting, or on whether or not they’re also formatting with a POD edition in mind.
The page sizes most typically used by yours truly here are 8.5 x 11 inches for Smashwords publishing (which is reformatted to other file formats) or 6 x 9 inches for print formatting through POD and for my imprint.
Your typical grocery store paperback impulse buy measures at 4.25 x 6.75 inches.
Font size seems to be recommended at around 10-11 points, from my looking/reading around.
Okay, let’s illustrate the fact that it’s word count that matters over page count when it comes to ebooks:
My free novella, Shades of Gray, has a word count of 20, 098.
- 8.5 x 11 equals 34 pages
- 6 x 9 equals 65 pages
- 4.25 x 6.75 equals 157 pages
My ‘category novel’, Tria’s Tale, has a 33, 876 word count.
- 8.5 x 11 equals 75 pages
- 6 x 9 equals 132 pages
- 4.25 x 6.75 equals 306 pages
And there’s variances between page counts depending on the final file format. For Tria’s Tale at Smashwords:
- Online HTML reading: 96 pages
- Download the PDF and it’s 76 pages at 100% view
- RTF? That’s 75 pages.
No clue what the page counts are for .mobi, .epub or the other ereader formats available.
And since readers can change font sizes to suit their comfort, the page counts are likely to change again.
So the number of pages for ebooks doesn’t matter, and shouldn’t be taken into consideration when pricing them.
You can format a 10k short story to be 35, 49 or even 95 pages long, but it’s still a short story and you shouldn’t be pricing it at ‘novel’ prices.
Ebooks should show word count on their listing pages (which I do for our titles at Katarr Kanticles Press, Smashwords gives an approximation of, but Amazon doesn’t; they just show the file size in bytes).
That way purchasers have an idea of what they’re getting and don’t feel cheated or disappointed when they discover they paid $7 for a 30k novella.
It all comes back to setting sensible pricing schedules for your ebooks in the end, people.
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