How To Tell The Difference Between a Reader and an Author

This is going to be a short post, just a little advice/an observance that I’ve had.

It’s something that I’ve noticed particularly keenly in the past year or so after I’ve actually completely my first draft manuscript. Whenever people find out that I’ve written a book there are two to three questions they ask. 1. What’s it called? I’ll respond that I don’t have a title yet. I hate picking out titles. And character names. Sooooooooo much. Question #2. What’s it about? I usually try to be as vague as I can and say “revenge”. And if that doesn’t get them to back off, they’ll usually ask me how long it is. My usual answer is that the first draft is about 65,000 words, but I’m hoping to add another 5-15 thousand.

Then I get the blank look and they ask me to tell them how many pages that is.

Authors measure length in words, readers measure length in pages.

Can’t really blame either party though. Books don’t come with a word count at the bottom of a page. They come with a page number. If there’s anywhere in a book that says how many words the book is, I have yet to find it in all my years of reading books. Pages are quick and easy to reference to. It makes sense for a reader to think about the length of a book in terms of pages.

Authors however have to think of it a little differently especially when they’re writing. Because of things like font, font size, margin size, dialogue vs action, counting in terms of pages isn’t the smarted way to go. A good example I can think of is when I tried to write a really long book when I was seven or eight. It wasn’t coming out long enough so I made the font bigger and the spaces between the lines bigger. True, since we’re all mature (…) teenagers here or older we know that changing the font and the spaces isn’t really going to make our novels longer, but the point still remains (I typed ‘still remains’ at the same time it was said in my song :D).

Pages numbers are easily manipulated. Words counts tell all. Publishers don’t want to know your pages count they want to know your word count, they’ll make your page count what they will with margins fonts sizes page size ect.

That’s how you can tell the difference between an author and reader. Authors measure length in words, readers measure length in pages.

Short post terminated.