The other day, someone posted about some fairly obvious rage-bait from a reviewer. In this spirited announcement, the reviewer said they and some friends were going to collude to artificially bring down books they felt were “too long.”
The plot was to automatically ding any book over 100,000 words with a one-star review from each member of the group. Their argument was that there was no reason for any book to be that long. Therefore their reviews would read “could have been shorter.” That’s an opinion, and it can’t necessarily be untrue, since it’s an opinion. (You could argue that any book could be shorter. If you particularly hated a piece of micro fiction, you could still argue it could have been even shorter. The author could have just not written it.)
My question? How the fuck do you know how many words a book is?
Page Count Does Not Equal Word Count
I’ll start off with a general rule: the longer the book, the higher the word count, the more pages. There is a correlation between page count and word count in that sense.
Yet page count cannot tell you what the word count of a particular book is. I know this for fact, because I’ve helped with the page design for plenty of books. One of the things we were always trying to do in academic publishing was cram the most words onto a page possible. That meant even our most windbaggy professors would have a book that wasn’t a doorstop.
We usually didn’t go above 400 to 450 words per page, but there are ways you can cram more onto a page. (These usually violate good design and make the book look far less inviting—tiny font, reduced leading, smaller margins, expanded text blocks, and so on. Book designers have a lot of tricks up their sleeves.)
Don’t Believe Me? Compare Editions of Classics
There are a whole host of factors that affect the number of pages in the printed book, even if the book is the exact same number of words. This is why you can’t pick up, say, a Penguin edition of Wuthering Heights and expect the page numbers to be the exact same as the copy you got from HarperCollins. The story’s length didn’t change. There are variations between the original version Emily published and the one her sister Charlotte edited after Emily’s death, so you also have to watch out for which version you’re looking at, yes. On the whole, the point stands. If you’re comparing the Emily version to another Emily version, then the manuscript itself is the same length. Yet between the different editions, you will note that the number of pages is different.
That’s all down to design decisions. I own two different copies of Wuthering Heights, both from Penguin RandomHouse. One is their “classics” line, which is a 5 x 8” trim, like many paperbacks. The other is a “fashion” edition with an illustrated cover, ragged edges, and a much larger trim (probably 7 x 8”). Opening them up, you can see the type is much different as well, in addition to the leading and so on.
That means that, even though these two books contain the exact same manuscript, where the text falls on any given page could be wildly different. That’s why you can’t really use different editions when you’re trying to keep up with your English classes. It’s absolutely why you have to cite what edition you’re using when you write a paper.
What about eBooks?
You might think we’d get around the issue with eBooks. After all, pagination isn’t really a thing in eBooks, not the same way it is in print books. We can also scroll through them by percentage.
In a lot of ways, eBooks are actually even worse for determining the length of a book. The percentage bit is useful, but how quickly you can make your way through a book depends on a lot of factors.
eBook pagination doesn’t work the same way book pagination does because most eBooks are what we call reflowable. That means the text can “reflow” based on all kinds of parameters: the size of your screen, for example. A reflowable eBook adjusts itself when it appears on an iPad screen versus a tiny phone screen. There are also other variables: your font settings, for example, including the size.
We Don’t Even Bother Designing eBooks Because of Customization
This factor is one reason the book industry generally doesn’t bother designing eBooks. The fact of the matter is that the user has so much power over what’s displayed to them—which is awesome—that you can’t really bother designing. The user’s settings will override your design anyway.
You can change that if you use what’s called a fixed-layout eBook, but these are very unpopular for a few reasons. As you might imagine, they don’t resize to different screens very well. And they certainly aren’t great for accessibility. (I see all these “fancy” designs and honestly? I cringe. That’s less than ideal, because you need to account for how the page is going to be resized. It certainly sucks for anyone who needs accessibility. Sometimes you have to format pages as images to get the elements to resize properly, which are then inaccessible without alt-text.)
Fixed-layout eBooks generally have pagination, and they usually match the print. There are reasons to use a fixed layout. As I said, though, for the majority of text-only books, it’s better to allow the book to reflow.
So, it can be very difficult to get a sense of how long an eBook is. The pagination within an eBook could technically vary, depending on your settings. That means eBooks are even less reliable when it comes to indicating length. As we discussed, design is a huge factor in determining page counts. Now we’re tossing user preferences for different fonts and font sizes in there, plus needing to adapt to different screen sizes.
What about Audiobooks?
There is a conversion you can use to determine the approximate length of an audiobook, based on the formula of word count / average speed per hour. A 50,000-word book is around 5 hours, I believe. But this can also vary. It might depend on the speaker’s speed, on any gaps or music inserted between scenes or chapters, and so on. So this isn’t always a great indicator of length either.
Add in that you can slow down and speed up audiobooks—similar to how users control how eBooks display—and you’ve got a less than reliable indicator of how long a book is.
So, Where the Heck Are They Getting Word Counts?
All of this wraps me back around to my original question. Unless I’ve handled the manuscript myself or the author has told me, say, in a social media post, I won’t even hazard a guess at how many words a book is.
The only reliable way I know to get the word count of a book is to a) ask, or b) see the manuscript. You could, in theory, take a PDF and back it out into Word.
I doubt these people are doing this. One, most people don’t have access to Adobe Acrobat (it’s not free). Assuming they do, for some reason, then this is technologically possible. They need a DRM-free PDF, which I will assume they can get their hands on.
Yet, even if it’s possible, I also sincerely doubt these people are going through and cleaning their text files up. (I will, but I’m usually getting paid to do it.) For some books, that absolutely would not matter that much. A book that’s 150,000 words is unlikely to come down under 100,000 on the basis of removing front matter, back matter, and headers and footers that might have exploded out of the PDF. I mean, it could happen, but it’s unlikely.
But for a book sitting at, say, 104,000 or even 110,000? Removing those “extra” words could be the difference. So even once you’ve gone to all this trouble, your word count may not even be accurate.
This leads me to believe people are either using very inaccurate word counts, or … they’re simply not doing this at all.
It Was Rage-Bait
Why would you announce that you’re doing this, other than to piss people off and start drama?
There is a non-zero chance that there are some reviewers out there running around, dinging books because they felt they were “too long.”
As an editor, I see a lot of people writing books that are far too long for their genre. And while the author might argue that their work absolutely needs to be 100k, 150k, 200k words long, in most cases? It can be tightened up.
Getting feedback from readers who complain the book is “too long” or that it’s boring or drags is sometimes the only way these authors ever accept that kind of criticism. Behind the scenes, editors might try to convince them that their story has saggy middle syndrome or that there’s needless drama distracting the story from itself. But at the end of the day, it’s the author’s story, and if they want to keep in that pointless story arc about the characters losing the MacGuffin, only to find it again sixty pages later, and to learn absolutely nothing in the process, that’s their prerogative.
Legitimate Reviews Can Help Authors Learn
Sometimes, the court of public opinion is the only thing that can get sense into an author’s head. And even then, it doesn’t always work—plenty of authors will huff and vehemently disagree, even if all their readers are saying the same thing. (My stance on that is if everyone is saying the same thing, then it’s likely something you need to consider.)
When people start falsifying reviews or saying negative things “just because”—without even reading the book, because they’re lazy—it only strengthens authors’ positions when it comes to not listening to their editors, their readers, and their reviewers.
So while I totally do not believe for one second that these reviewers are able to find accurate information about word counts to base their reviews on, I do think they have a point. And while I think they maybe have a point, I also think that reviewers need to remember that criticism only reaches the authors when it’s legitimate. Lying and falsifying reviews is a great way to make sure no one ever listens to reviewers or readers.
If you really feel a book is too long? Write a detailed review of why. It doesn’t need to go into literary analysis. A few quick lines like “the middle of the story drags,” or “I got bored partway through,” are a lot more helpful—and a lot more convincing.
Unless you want to be a sassy bitch and say the book probably would have been better if it was zero words. Then by all means, give that burn.
