I wanted to see for myself what I’m getting myself into for my third manuscript. This book will, of course, connect the first two, but will be far larger than the others because there is so much more going on in the story to get to the final climax and conclusion of the whole story.
I did some calculations by basic calculator with a slight inflated ball park numbers. Average chapter word count x current chapter count set up by my outline.
5,000 word count x 40 chapters = 200,000 word count
This isn’t counting the possible 10 or more chapters extra that I need to add into my outline that is missing from the synopsis.
I found on this site: Words Per Page Calculator where I put in the 200,000 word count to determine the page count, which came to 502 (mind, this is only for printed pages of size 12, New Times Roman font, not a full published book) The page numbers for 5,000 word count is single spaced and comes to at least 18 pages each.
Now that I understand the basic numbers of how many pages I may reach, I can focus more on the outline for setting up that possible marker.
While calculating, I nearly gave myself a heart attack, but more of a mind blowing moment. I don’t know how I came to 84 chapters during my first set of numbers since I couldn’t look back at what I had done, but if it were 84 chapters, 5,000 words per chapter, that came to 420,000 word count and 1,054 pages printed single spaced. OMG, the amount of time it would have taken me to complete such a massive book.
Glad I did a second set of numbers. Now, off to work on the outline.
Tara B. Dobbs 