How many pages is 80,000 words?

Manuscript pages vs printed pages

“Pages” means two different things. A manuscript page is a double-spaced sheet of US Letter or A4 in standard manuscript format; a printed page is a page of the finished book. The traditional rule of 250 words to a manuscript page dates from typewriters: as William Shunn explains, it worked because a typewriter fitted exactly ten characters to the inch and about 25 double-spaced lines to the page. He also points out that publishers now go by the computer’s word count, not by pages.

On a word processor the rule no longer holds. In this calculator’s layout of 12-point Times New Roman, double-spaced with 1-inch margins, a page holds 23 lines and about 330 words of ordinary prose; in Courier New, about 230, close to the old rule. So quote your word count to editors and agents, and use pages only to plan a printed book.

How the printed-page estimate works

The calculator lays your words into the text area of a page, line by line, the way a typesetter would on average. Each assumption is shown in the result, and you can change all but two of them.

• Words per line come from the width of the text area divided by the width of an average word in your chosen type. We measured that width, including the space after each word, using each font’s own letter widths on 613 words of narrative prose with dialogue: 1.99 times the type size for EB Garamond (narrow), 2.12 for Times New Roman (medium) and 2.49 for Source Serif 4 (wide). Half a word per line is lost where lines break.
• Lines per page are the text area’s height divided by the line spacing, rounded down. Running heads and page numbers sit in the margins.
• Paragraphs each add a one-em indent and leave, on average, half their last line empty. Dialogue-heavy fiction has more, shorter paragraphs, so it fills more pages for the same words.
• Chapters each start on a new page a third of the way down, and on average leave half of their last page empty. If chapters must open on a right-hand page, half of them need a blank page before them.

The two fixed assumptions are the measured word widths and the half-line rules. Real typesetting, with hyphenation, justification and widow control, will land somewhere near the estimate, not on it, and front matter, part titles and back matter add pages on top. The total is rounded up to an even number, because every leaf of a book has two sides.

Trim sizes and margins

The trim sizes here are four of KDP’s standard paperback sizes, 5 × 8, 5.25 × 8, 5.5 × 8.5 and 6 × 9 inches, and the two classic UK paperback formats: B-format, 198 × 129 mm, and A-format, 178 × 111 mm, as the UK printer Clays lists them. KDP sets a minimum inside margin, the gutter, that grows with the page count: 0.375 inches up to 150 pages, 0.5 up to 300, 0.625 up to 500, 0.75 up to 700 and 0.875 up to 828, with outside margins of at least 0.25 inches. The result warns you if your inside margin is narrower than KDP allows.

Spine width

KDP publishes the paper thickness it uses to size a paperback’s spine: 0.002252 inches a page for white paper and 0.0025 inches for cream, both with black ink. Multiply by the page count and you have the spine. The calculator does this only for page counts KDP prints, 24 to 828 pages (776 on cream). KDP’s cover guide puts the threshold for spine text at 79 pages. IngramSpark builds its cover templates with a generator in your account rather than publishing a figure per page, so use that for an IngramSpark edition.

Worked example

An 80,000-word novel at 6 × 9 inches, in 11-point type of medium width with lines 1.4 times the type size and ¾-inch margins, gets 35 lines to a page and about 13.4 words to a line. With 24 chapters and an average of 50 words to a paragraph, that is about 372 words to a page and 216 pages. The spine comes to 0.486 inches (12.4 mm) on white paper or 0.54 inches (13.7 mm) on cream, and the ¾-inch inside margin is more than KDP’s 0.5-inch minimum for 216 pages. The same book at 5 × 8 inches runs to about 308 pages.

Common mistakes

• Using 250 words a page for a printed book. That rule describes typewritten manuscript pages.
• Forgetting the pages that aren’t chapters. Title page, copyright page, contents, acknowledgements and an excerpt from your next book all add to the count and the spine.
• Changing only the type size. Margins, line spacing and the typeface’s width move the count as much, which is why the calculator shows them all.
• Ordering a cover before the interior is final. The spine depends on the final page count.

For the length category of your word count, novel or novella, try the story length checker; for how long it takes to read, Shelf Sonnet. A home library planner such as Dragon Bookcase can tell you whether the finished book will make your shelf sag.