Nerding out on Word Count per Lit Page - 3500

[Voyeurkenneth]

For those who might find it helpful, I ran some stats to determine how many Lit words* are on one Lit page.

*Lit words: Number of words as calculated in the Submission box (which may be different than the word counter in Word or other processors)

The average I found: 3497 Lit words per Lit page.

^This average of 3497 was based on nearly 50 full pages from my own stories. If I was more of a math person, I'd be curious what the +/- margins are to see a comfortable range of how many words could fit on a Lit page.

Why might this matter?
-Sometimes clicking on the next page has flow implications for a reader. They might decide to take a break, using the next page as a pause point. I know I have.
-In those cases, it made me consider whether it's beneficial to tag dialogue on a subsequent page to avoid any potential confusion on a reader's part when they resume a story.
-The word count per page estimate can also be helpful if one wants to avoid that tiny amount of story text that sometimes spills onto a new page.
-Overall, your story is your story, and you can (and should!) write it however you want without regard to arbitrary word count considerations.

The ~3500 estimate matches what others have previously cited, but it wasn't ever clear to me if they meant "Lit words" or "Word words." There's also a 3750 estimate mentioned in AH. Obviously, one's "Lit word count per Lit page" will vary by one's style of writing: how blocky your paragraphs are, more dialogue-based, etc. Overall, I don't know if there's a hard "number of lines of text" limit per Lit page.

 

[StillStunned]

A while ago some of us speculated that it was a character limit. Something like 20k characters, including spaces, I think.

 

[ElectricBlue]

The ~3500 estimate matches what others have previously cited, but it wasn't ever clear to me if they meant "Lit words" or "Word words." There's also a 3750 estimate mentioned in AH. Obviously, one's "Lit word count per Lit page" will vary by one's style of writing: how blocky your paragraphs are, more dialogue-based, etc. Overall, I don't know if there's a hard "number of lines of text" limit per Lit page.

It's a character sized block in the data set, nothing to do with the number of lines. It's also not an absolute "must fill" data block. I discovered this in my first year with a story that, very annoyingly, broke with a single sentence on the last page. I tried to fix it by losing fifty words or so, which should have blocked that last sentence with the rest of the story. It didn't.

That's where I found that 3,750 + 50 is my go to word number per page - it's consistent for my style across every story or chapter I've submitted. It's academic though - you can't predict where a page break will happen, so there's no point worrying about that.

 

[SimonDoom]

My average also is closer to 3750 words per page. I use that as my benchmark.

It's close enough. The differences are the results of style--size of paragraphs, spacing, etc.

 

[Plathfan]

That's where I found that 3,750 is my go to word number per page - it's consistent for my style across every story or chapter I've submitted. It's academic though - you can't predict where a page break will happen, so there's no point worrying about that.

3,750 is sparse in dialogue, or it contains dialogue where the interlocutors speak at length, weighed down by excessive tags. Methinks.

 

[Voyeurkenneth]

@SimonDoom @ElectricBlue Good to know. Is your 3750 number derived from Microsoft Word?

The word processor I use (Apple Pages) has a word counter that calculates fewer words than Lit's submission box. For scale, I placed a 14,000k story in Lit's submission box and it resulted in 20 more words counted compared to my program.

 

[SimonDoom]

@SimonDoom @ElectricBlue Good to know. Is your 3750 number derived from Microsoft Word?

The word processor I use (Apple Pages) has a word counter that calculates fewer words than Lit's submission box. For scale, I placed a 14,000k story in Lit's submission box and it resulted in 20 more words counted compared to my program.

Good question. I don't know the answer, because I haven't checked for a while. This is the number I work with because it seems to work in terms of predicting, based on my writing style, when a page will end.

 

[SimonDoom]

Some authors employ a style of writing very, very short paragraphs. They may have a lot of dialogue, or they may just like paragraphs that consist of no more than three sentences, and often just one or two.

Those authors will have lower word counts per page.

I mix up paragraph lengths. I'm very diligent about breaking different dialogue lines into different paragraphs, but I intersperse dialogue with narrative and description that sometimes might consist of longer paragraphs.

 

[AwkwardMD]

I'd guessed 3500 words, based on how my own stories displayed, years ago.

 

[alohadave]

@SimonDoom @ElectricBlue Good to know. Is your 3750 number derived from Microsoft Word?

The word processor I use (Apple Pages) has a word counter that calculates fewer words than Lit's submission box. For scale, I placed a 14,000k story in Lit's submission box and it resulted in 20 more words counted compared to my program.

3750 comes from 15 pages at 250 words a page, double spaced.

That is an old standard amount of text that fits on a sheet of typewriter paper.

 

[ElectricBlue]

3,750 is sparse in dialogue, or it contains dialogue where the interlocutors speak at length, weighed down by excessive tags. Methinks.

I see you've covered two opposite notions, so your comment is meaningless.

Matter of fact, I counted up my tag ratios once, following a thread on the matter. Maybe 20% he said, she said, maybe 10% - 15% where the context made it clear who was speaking, the rest no tags at all.

 

[ElectricBlue]

@SimonDoom @ElectricBlue Good to know. Is your 3750 number derived from Microsoft Word?

The word processor I use (Apple Pages) has a word counter that calculates fewer words than Lit's submission box. For scale, I placed a 14,000k story in Lit's submission box and it resulted in 20 more words counted compared to my program.

A freebie Word clone.

Keep in mind that double-barelled will give you one word, whereas double - barrelled will give you three. From what I can figure out, the word count comes from the spaces in between, not the words themselves. If you type ellipsis like this . . . your word count will climb, whereas this... will keep it much smaller.

It's only an approximation, and your style probably won't be anything like mine. It's one of those things that is useful to know, not essential.

 

[SimonDoom]

As a test, I copied all the words from Literotica page 1 of my most recently published story, plugged the content into a Word document, and the word count was 3805. I scanned the story quickly, and it looked at first glance like it was somewhat denser, and with less white space, than my usual story, so I'm not surprised.

 

[Voyeurkenneth]

As a test, I copied all the words from Literotica page 1 of my most recently published story, plugged the content into a Word document, and the word count was 3805. I scanned the story quickly, and it looked at first glance like it was somewhat denser, and with less white space, than my usual story, so I'm not surprised.

For what it's worth, I did the same with your story, except plugged it into the submission box: 3799

 

[SimonDoom]

For what it's worth, I did the same with your story, except plugged it into the submission box: 3799

Interesting! Close enough.

 

[SouthernCrossfire]

I'm in the approximately 3,750 word crowd, having tested it several times over several stories, regardless of being heavy in narrative or heavy in dialogue. However, using a lot of HTML reduces this.

 

[ronde]

I tend to write a lot of dialogue, so my number is considerably smaller at 3177 words per Lit page. That's an average of the "Word" word counts and Lit pages for all my stories.

 

[NotWise]

Things can get very nerdy when talking up word counts.

Several years ago I asked here if anyone had studied Lit's code enough to say how the pages were broken. One member said he "saw something about 20000 characters."

Another observation is that pages generally break between paragraphs, so no word count or character count alone determines the break.

I have a program that tries to predict where the page breaks will fall in my stories. That's mostly to avoid having small fragments orphaned on the last Lit page.

The program is fairly good at predicting breaks. It breaks pages before the paragraph that passes the 20000-character count. There are enough variations to know that the method isn't exact. The differences could be with how characters are counted, or with where the break is relative to paragraphs. It is, at any rate, very close. The method is hardly ever off by more than a paragraph, even if the paragraphs are very short.

What that means in terms of words varies a lot, because different writers will tend to use longer or shorter words, and because of punctuation.

But, for instance, words in the NY Times average 5.1 characters. Counting the following space and ignoring punctuation, that would be a Lit page length of 3278 words. Accounting for punctation would decrease the word count/page.

If you're getting 3177 words/Lit page (like @ronde) then you're using 6.3 characters per word, including trailing spaces and punctuation with the per-word count. Actual average character/word would be a little under 5.3 characters/word -- so maybe a little longer the the NYT average, but not a lot.

Using LibreOffice, the word count and character count in my WIP gives an average of 5.23 characters per word, which is very consistent with my other stories I've checked. That means I typically write with shorter words than the NY Times, and I should get about 3800 words per Lit page.

 

[Voyeurkenneth]

The program is fairly good at predicting breaks. It breaks pages before the paragraph that passes the 20000-character count. There are enough variations to know that the method isn't exact. The differences could be with how characters are counted, or with where the break is relative to paragraphs. It is, at any rate, very close. The method is hardly ever off by more than a paragraph, even if the paragraphs are very short.

Fascinating! Do you know if the 20,000k character count is inclusive of html tagging?

 

[NotWise]

Fascinating! Do you know if the 20,000k character count is inclusive of html tagging?

I try to count only characters that appear on-screen, and it mostly works. HTML is either uncounted or (in the case of entities) counted as the character it represents.

One of the question marks for me is whether it counts the space that falls at the end of a line.

 

[TheLobster]

I try to count only characters that appear on-screen, and it mostly works. HTML is either uncounted or (in the case of entities) counted as the character it represents.

One of the question marks for me is whether it counts the space that falls at the end of a line.

The word counter in the submission form is client-side. Since you're clearly passionate about this topic, you could dig into the JavaScript that drives it and see how it works for sure

 

[NotWise]

The word counter in the submission form is client-side. Since you're clearly passionate about this topic, you could dig into the JavaScript that drives it and see how it works for sure

The submission form may count characters, but it doesn't show page breaks, so that wouldn't help all that much.

 

[NotWise]

I said upstream a little that my program for predicting page breaks isn't always right. You can get a pretty good idea where a page breaks will fall without getting that fancy. Just use your word-processor's character count. The breaks will fall near 20000, 40000, 60000, etc. It will probably take some trial and error to find those breaks, but you don't even have to be exact about that.

 

[AwkwardMD]

I've also seen it where pages will break with a scene if there's a convenient scene break within +/- 500 words

 

[NotWise]

I haven't actually looked at that little program for predicting page breaks in quite a while, and this thread made me look again. It's actually predicting page breaks after the count exceeds 20000 characters rather than before.

For my most recent story, the page breaks were all predicted one paragraph too early, so it looks like the program needs to count more than just the visible characters, but I've experimented with that before and haven't found alternatives that work very well.

Using the character count in my word processor (including all spaces and all html), the page breaks were at 19578 characters, 39162 characters and 58792 characters, whereas I would have guessed them near 20000, 40000, and 60000 characters. The breaks came short in each case, but they're close.

In terms of words, the page lengths were off by < 100 words, which is probably closer than you can get by using the word count alone.