To follow up on my previous post, I posed the question of how to calculate word count to Colleen Lindsay over at The Swivet. I was not the only person with such a question, so she (being such a kind person) talked to one of her industry contacts about it. You can read about it here, but this is the important part:
Colleen asked this:
I have writers who’ve been asking me about how to estimate word counts. Most new authors go by their MS Word counter. Some writers are using the old pages x 250, based on 12-inch Courier text with 1″ margins. Are new writers simply over-thinking this?
Betsy Mitchell, VP & Editor-in-Chief of Del Rey Books replied:
Yes, they’re over-thinking. Using the MS Word counter and putting “approximately xx,xxx words” is good enough on a submission.
While that didn’t technically answer the question, it makes it fairly clear that word count isn’t something to get hung up on (at least until further down the road.) I’ll keep an eye out for verification of how to properly estimate word count. When I come across something useful, I’ll certainly post about it.
