#fic wordcount

[oakandgumtrees]

Okay, but how many WORDS of fic are there? A proposed method for estimating total word count for a set of fics on Ao3

Some statistics are really easy to find on Ao3. Some are harder.

The word count of an individual work? Easy. The word count of a group of works? You have to add it up manually.

Or do you?

(Note: All statistics in this post are from data gathered on the 28th-29th July, 2023, and will be out of date in the specifics. My focus is on trends.)

If we only had an average

If we knew what the AVERAGE (or mean) word count for a group of works was , we could simply multiply by the number of works, and we'd have the total!

But we don't have the average.

We do, however, have the ability to sort a group of fics by word count, do some arithmetic to figure out what the middle item in that list is, and check that individual fic. (E.g. in a list of five fics, what is the word count of the third-longest work?)

This is the median - surely that's going to be close to the average, right?

Unfortunately, no.

Wordcount Georg is an outlier adn is difficult to count

You know that one MASSIVE fic? The one that's, like, half a million words, and a hundred chapters, and it's still going?

You thought of one straight away, didn't you?

Well, it turns out a LOT of fandoms have that fic. Or several of them.

But they're usually very few compared to a much LARGER number of very short works. Take the MCU fandom. When I checked, only 1% of MCU fics were over 100,000 words - and 25% were under 1000 words.

The median is usually close to the average when the distribution of a set of numbers looks like this:

But the distribution of the length of fics in most fandoms looks more like this:

In that sort of distribution, the median and the mean can be a LONG way apart.

A median can still tell you a lot about the most common kinds of fic. But it's going to completely miss all those super-long outliers, and if you want to find the TOTAL word count, you need those.

Counting things the cheating-cheater way

I would like to propose a method I've been calling 'multiple median estimation'.

Here's how it works:

Sort your fics by word count, then divide the list into chunks. Ten percent of the total number is often a good size.

Find the fic in the middle of each chunk to get the median word count for THAT set of fics.

When a chunk has a median SUBSTANTIALLY bigger than the previous chunk, break it up into smaller pieces, and repeat.

Once you have all your medians, multiply each one by the number of fics in that chunk, and add together to get your estimated total.

Let's see how that pans out across a few different fandoms...in part 2!

[cloversreblogs]

Fic wordcount for 2018

In 2018, I have published a total of 11 stories! Altogether, the stories’ wordcounts are...

Spite date (SpUK)=954 Rebirth and retrouvailles (ParPru)=6819 Pink Umbrella (Eclipse Lolu)=574 Ephemeral butterfly dreams (NethWan)=5514 Memento Mori (solo Kingdom of the Franks)=5551 138 Bastille days (Bastille day/Paris France family fic)=1577 How do I love thee? (SpUK)=1965 Lost and found (solo Nyo Prussia)=225 A moment of distraction (DBH The Nest chapter)=487 ParPru drabbles (ParPru) =1475 Fireworks (OzNZ)=1488

Which equals 26629 words! (Granted, the data is from FFN.net so it includes author’s notes so about hmm... 25K)

With my updates, I have updated

Brass in the grey 7 times, amounting to 29188 words, Truth of the past 1 times, amounting to 1508 words,

And furthermore, I have written 25044 words for my NaNoWriMo project!

Altogether, that is a whopping 82369 words! Holy shit!

To everyone who have reblogged my fics, read, and commented on my fics, thank you, and have a glorious 2019!

[jestbee]

Wordcount - January 2018

I’m late with this because I was waiting until I was back on my desktop computer because I hate fiddling about with screenshotting and everything on my laptop. 

Here is January: 

You can see that now I’m colour coding the word count column depending on how many words are done. It’s conditionally formatted to turn a colour between red and green depending on the highest and lowest amounts. 

11.6k for the month was a pretty good start. Alot of it was the original novel which was supposed to be the main focus. Although you can see how distracted I got with other things. 

Project counts:

You’ll see I also started something with the code name ‘beacons’ and ‘Carry me’ which are v exciting things I’m v excited about but won’t be up for a while so I’m not going to bother mentioning them. At least not until Ships is finished. 

Mostly WIPs again, but I posted quite a bit:

Not fic - I’ve linked to one of them, but the wordcount is for various little things I posted to Tumblr that I wrote while a bit tipsy and I’m not even sure I tagged them but you could always search not fic on my blog and see what happens.

Act Naturally (Chapters 1 - 5) 

If it happened on a random Thursday

If it happened during spin the bottle

This all means my year is looking like this so far:

Posting late always means you get a sneak peak of next month. As you can see Feb is more productive that January. Probably because I’m writing things I like. 

Also Vday fic for the upcoming fic fest. So... yeah. 

YOU CAN FIND A BLANK VERSION OF THE TRACKER I USE FOR THIS HERE IF YOU WANT TO USE IT FOR YOUR OWN WRITING. 

(all I ask is that if you do you tag back to this blog)

[lampregistration3000]

Oh since it’s February:

January fanfic word total was 512,307!