Nerding out on Word Count per Lit Page - 3500

[NotWise]

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

Doesn't that imply that Laurel read the text and manually placed the break?

 

[AwkwardMD]

Doesn't that imply that Laurel read the text and manually placed the break?

Or at least skimmed it.

 

[ChloeTzang]

rotflmao. This strikes me as the quintessential Literotica geek thread. LOL. I mean, word counts - I love these posts! The analysis! The theorizing! The speculation!

This is all something I have never thought about. I think someone told me it was around 3500 words per Lit page way back in 2015 and I just accepted that and have worked on that for approximate story lengths ever since. I have concluded I am nowhere near geeky enough! LOL.

 

[NotWise]

rotflmao. This strikes me as the quintessential Literotica geek thread. LOL. I mean, word counts - I love these posts! The analysis! The theorizing! The speculation!

This is all something I have never thought about. I think someone told me it was around 3500 words per Lit page way back in 2015 and I just accepted that and have worked on that for approximate story lengths ever since. I have concluded I am nowhere near geeky enough! LOL.

At least the thread title is a fair warning.

 

[ChloeTzang]

At least the thread title is a fair warning.

LOL. It is....it made me laugh, it's so true. After reading thru all the posts I feel as if I am letting the side down. I am just not nerdy enough for this. LOL But I love it!!!!

I'm sure there's a plot bunny here for the geek day event.

 

[Voyeurkenneth]

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

I just benefitted from this so I'm apt to think this is true. But it's hard for me to believe this is being done on a conscious basis for 150 new stories a day or whatever that number is. Or maybe it is plausible--just tedious!

I just tested one of my stories against this 20,000k character limit per page. On 2 of the 3 full pages, the total characters by page (including spaces) did NOT exceed 20,000k (but did exceed 19,000). However, on those 2 pages, they could've accommodated an additional paragraph respectively and still have been below 20k. I used the 'Characters (with spaces)' counter on Microsoft Word.

 

[ElectricBlue]

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.

I believe it does, because a space is, in essence, a blank character.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Doesn't that imply that Laurel read the text and manually placed the break?

I tried twice to get my hanging sentence onto the page before, by losing some text. I put a note to the editor both times, saying what I was trying to do.

From that, I speculate that, once the data file has a page block allocated, you've got that page forever and there has to be something on it.

It makes sense to me that a database has a character limited size, and anything in it (including html code) contributes to the count. That's certainly the case for Blogger, which has a 4000 character comment limit, and another site I published on for a short while, which had a 10,000 character block for the primary content. That was tedious, because you had to load and link each page to the last yourself. The feedback was non-existent, so I stopped publishing there.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

... site I published on for a short while, which had a 10,000 character block for the primary content. That was tedious, because you had to load and link each page to the last yourself. The feedback was non-existent, so I stopped publishing there.

That describes this forum, EB.

-Annie

 

[LargoKitt]

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.

A couple of puzzles here: A Pages or Word document generally divides pages at about 350 words. So a Lit 'page' is a ten page print story. Another bit of ridiculousness, if you think about it, is that if you read on a laptop or pad you are perusing a long vertical scroll on a horizontal screen. How many 'pages' you see depends on your browser and how you set magnification. The 'silly' thing is that, since it's a scroll to begin with, there's no reason for pages at all. (Except maybe if you stop reading to please your succubus and then return to the story.) And then, if you read on a phone there's a whole different dynamic. (And maybe you are old school and print out your favorites...)

 

[ElectricBlue]

A couple of puzzles here: A Pages or Word document generally divides pages at about 350 words. So a Lit 'page' is a ten page print story. Another bit of ridiculousness, if you think about it, is that if you read on a laptop or pad you are perusing a long vertical scroll on a horizontal screen. How many 'pages' you see depends on your browser and how you set magnification. The 'silly' thing is that, since it's a scroll to begin with, there's no reason for pages at all. (Except maybe if you stop reading to please your succubus and then return to the story.) And then, if you read on a phone there's a whole different dynamic. (And maybe you are old school and print out your favorites...)

I suspect Lit started out in the late nineties using commercially available database software, and the page length is a legacy of that.

 

[alohadave]

A couple of puzzles here: A Pages or Word document generally divides pages at about 350 words. So a Lit 'page' is a ten page print story. Another bit of ridiculousness, if you think about it, is that if you read on a laptop or pad you are perusing a long vertical scroll on a horizontal screen. How many 'pages' you see depends on your browser and how you set magnification. The 'silly' thing is that, since it's a scroll to begin with, there's no reason for pages at all. (Except maybe if you stop reading to please your succubus and then return to the story.) And then, if you read on a phone there's a whole different dynamic. (And maybe you are old school and print out your favorites...)

If you have your word processor show you print layout...

Word and Google Docs have options for web view or non-paginated. I imagine it's a common feature in other word processors.