Manuscript word count, pages and reading time WORDCOUNT
Words, pages in standard manuscript format, reading time and the length of each chapter, with the ranges agents and publishers usually give. Counted in this tab.
The text
How long it is
Paste some text or open a file, and the counts appear here.
Against the usual lengths
The ranges agents and publishers commonly give for a first book, and the short-fiction categories the Nebula Awards use. They are guides, not rules: plenty of published books sit outside them, and a publisher's or a competition's own guidelines come first.
How it works
How it counts, and what it does not do
A word is anything between spaces with a letter or a digit in it, so “well-known” and “don't” are one word each and a dash standing on its own is none. Word processors can differ on exactly these cases, by a few words in a book, so the rule is stated here rather than left to be guessed.
Manuscript pages are estimated at 250 words a page. That is the convention for standard manuscript format, 12-point Courier, double-spaced, with one-inch margins, and it is how publishers estimate a book's length; a page of short lines of dialogue holds fewer words, and Times New Roman fits more. Reading time is at 250 words a minute to begin with, a common pace for reading prose silently; change either figure to suit.
It reads .txt, Markdown and Word (.docx) files. It does not read .doc, .rtf, .odt, Pages or PDF files, does not count footnotes or text boxes in a Word file, and does not check spelling or style. Nothing typed or opened here leaves the tab.
Doing this often? OBSCURA Write keeps the count as you write, with targets for the book and the session, and compiles the manuscript to the format an agent asks for. On its own, US$2 a month; with everything else, US$5 a month or US$48 a year. 7 days free.