Another route to choose your word count is to look at “Comparison Titles”. Comparison Titles are books which you would like to see your book next to in a bookstore. On Amazon they would be the “Also Bought” books (‘Customers who bought this item also bought’).
Here’s a quick and easy way to get a very rough word count of these books. Either with your physical hard copy or using Amazon’s
- Randomly open the book to a full page of text.
- Count the average words of a full line.
- Count the number of lines on a page.
- Multiply the figures you got for (2) and (3) above, and then multiple this number by the number of pages in the book.
- Divide by 50% - This takes into account all the half lines and half pages of text.
EXAMPLE
I tried this for Back to Reality (which is 90,000 words).
(A) Average words per Line | 13 |
(B) Lines per page | 35 |
(C) Number of Pages | 375 |
(D) Total words (A x B x C = 13 x 35 x 375) | 170,625 |
Divide (D) by 50% | 85,310 |
Using this formula I was off by just under 5,000 words, or roughly 5%.