#word counts

[tc-doherty]

I missed the exact date, but I hit 4 million tracked words during March!

[bloodlessheirbyjacques]

2026 Writing Goal!

I have a feeling this year might not be as good as last. I had a monthly goal last year, with a minimum amount each month, but I don't think I'm gonna do that this time. I just want to write something each month. If it's above 0 each month, that's a win lol.

Last year I hit the most important goal of finishing my discovery draft of book 1! I even got through 1/3rd of my next draft! So I'm hoping to finish my next draft by the end of 2026!

Gonna try and hit 100k for the year at least!

Wish me luck! Gonna keep myself accountable by reblogging my monthly word counts!

[huntedbybenforsport]

Jet Lag Recs: 5-10k words

I’ve put my re-read bookmarks into a proper rec list on https://archiveofourown.org/users/huntedbybenforsport/bookmarks - I’m going to make a series of posts here with different groupings!

open my eyes (or: sam blindfold shenanigans) [series]

E, Adam/Ben/Sam, Mind-boggling Wendover pussy, need I say more

if tomorrow the world ends

E, Ben/Adam, Ben telling Adam to STEP THE FUCK UP

have you ever?

E, Ben/Adam, this was published on my birthday. My present now. My precious.

pendulum

E, Adam/Ben/Sam, crazy relationships between all of them

what happens in mas vegas

E, Adam/Ben/Sam, wonderfully in-character/in-universe writing

the sexplace gambit

E, Adam/Ben/Sam, the hottest fic in the fandom IMHO

one more fallen star

E, Sam/Adam (mostly), the most realistic first time ever written

sick entertainment

E, Adam/Ben/Sam, THIS IS THEIR FIRST TIME

jeopardy

Not Rated, Tom/Ludwig, yes this is a hilarious Jet Lag fic trust me

real hunger

M, Ben/Adam, painfully real they should do this forever

home is where the heart is

M, Adam/Ben/Sam, delightfully yearny angst

doesn't even know it yet

G, Ben/Adam, just plain adorable

[hermesmyplatonicbeloved]

Fic writers, how many fics did you write last year (2024)?

1 fic

2 fics

3-10 fics

11-25 fics

26-50 fics

51+ fics

Voting ended onFeb 2, 2025

Check out the poll for word counts

[michaelemon]

I think one of the things I struggle with with writing is always going to be word count / length

Which is Crazy because it shouldn’t matter; yet I’m paranoid something is too long or not long enough. I’m worried my transitions don’t make sense.

And then I realize I’m writing fanfiction and who the fuck cares

[iphysalian]

Word Counts and Why They Matter

I made a poll about whether, as you’re editing, you try to add extra detail to boost your wordcount, or trim and compact things to lower your wordcount. And I saw some reblogs absolutely baffled at the concept of adhering to any sort of wordcount goal so!

Obligatory one size does not fit all, just some general points I’m covering here. This is for original works intent on being published. Fanwork is lawless.

There are industry standards for different genres

Unless your reputation precedes you, looking on the surface like your competition, with a similar book size, thickness, and cover design helps your legitimacy, especially if you’re indie and self-published, you want to look as close to the pretty, traditionally published books as possible.

If you’re trying to get picked up by a publishing house, and your manuscript is too far outside the bell curve of the genre standard in either direction—by being too long or too short—you’re more of a risk. Too short and people might overlook it as being thin or lacking. Too long and people might not want to commit to 600 pages by someone they’ve never heard of.

Printing costs

Again, more for self-publishing, I haven’t been through the trad publishing process. Word count impacts page count, and the bigger the book, the more expensive it is to print (and edit), and the more your end customer has to pay to enjoy your work.

Even if you don’t want to charge them more, some platforms, like IngramSpark, cost so much to print, on top of the vendor fees, that you cannot publish at a negative margin (not that you’d want to). I have the same book on Amazon and IS, and on IS, it’s a whole dollar more because IS’s printing and vendor fees demand it.

So if you’ve got a really big book, you’ve got a really expensive book, and people might not buy it no matter how good it is if they can’t justify the price.

Consistency

This is not one size fits all. There are books that will have two hundred chapters, but those chapters might range from 5 pages to 15. One that comes to mind is the Maximum Ride series by James Patterson… but he got away with it because he had rapport. Those books were also consistently short chapters.

There’s also gimmicks like the 4 months of depression in New Moon when there were just blank pages in the middle of the book with only the months in the center of the page, to great effect. But those, too, weren’t four short chapters.

Consistency helps readers who don’t read entire books in one sitting know what they’re getting into and about how long it might take whenever they start a new chapter. If they just read one that’s 3k words and have time to read one more, and it’s 6k words that never ends, it risks not only being annoying, but damaging to the pacing if you can’t break up 6k words of plot into two chunks.

However, I don’t see a problem with “ramping up” the word count as the plot demands, a more gradual increase/decrease as opposed to one 10k word chapter in between two 2k word chapters.

Prologues and epilogues are an exception.

—

I think maybe the reblogs were more concerned with fanfic, in which case, go wild, there are no rules. I would like to mention though why I’m in the “I have to go back and trim my chapters down” camp.

Filler words

I don’t split hairs over trying to lower the total wordcount by 5 or 10 words, but I do go back for things like filler and crutch words that might only be 5 or 10 across the whole manuscript to improve the reading experience and overall maturity of the prose.

Efficiency

I don’t like lazy river style storytelling, and that’s a me thing. I need my scenes doing at least 2 things at once and having a rare few “this scene just exists to be fluffy and for no other reason”. So if I see that a chapter is too long, my first thought upon editing is “how can I compact some of the excess movement or redundant dialogue?” and I might move scenes around to the next or preceding chapter if it messes too much with my consistency.

..

I do have to worry about printing and editing costs, so being aware of my wordcount and not letting it run wild matters financially.

Within chapters, worrying about the wordcount goes out the window but I do try to ramp up and down slowly and not have a huge one sandwiched between two short ones.

Outside of one occasion, all of my books are multi-POV, and all my chapters are broken up into chunks. Which means shuffling around those chunks between chapters can mean the difference of 2-3k words if that’s what fits.

I’ll sacrifice wordcount consistency for pacing, but I’ve been doing this for long enough that if I do have a chapter that’s really too long, something somewhere is taking up too much narrative, or I’m trying to juggle too many elements at once, and looking at where the extra words are coming from helps me keep my chapters in focus unless it’s just that big of an event.

I tend to write some mammoth chapters, but since they're broken up into explicit chunks, it's easier to find a stopping point within a chapter of one of my books over one that's one long unbroken piece of narrative, but everybody has their preferences.

Individual chunks, however, vary wildly in their wordcounts, as they all serve different purposes coming together to tell the story of the chapter.

With that said, I have little excel tables with the wordcounts for each chapter I write… mostly because I love looking at statistics, and the range sometimes can very wildly.

So here’s a few of them just for fun:

Eternal Night Total — 111,423 Average — 5,982 Max — 9,162 Min —3,743

Eternal Night’s sequel so far Total — 49,195 Average — 7,208 Max — 7,907 Min —5,426

Tell Me How Long Total — 22,453 Average — 3,742 Max — 6,154 Min —1,533

Little Red Dot Total — 155,601 Average — 6,765 Max — 9,116 Min —2,375 (epilogue)

Little Red Dot’s unnamed sequel Total — 202,391 Average — 7,228 Max — 9,617 Min — 4,413

[nemisuki]

j-just finished updating my main masterlist & posted bakugo’s separate one… plz enjoy 😵‍💫❤️

[takaraphoenix]

Today I learned that AO3 stats actually show you your word count per year. I did not know that. Whenever I wanted to figure that out, I did the damn math by hand.

So I got curious.

And it's actually interesting. To me, anyway.

The earliest stat that makes sense to check is 2015, since in 2014 I transferred four years worth of fics onto the account as I started it.

And the years 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 were all rather similar at around a million words per year, give or take 100k (but in a manner that does even out to a million on average again).

2019 saw a dip into 775k, which surprises me because I genuinely don't remember anything significant happening that year to justify the drop.

The years 2020, 2021 and 2022 all clog in at around 660k each, give or take 10k, much lower but also steady. And this does make more sense, between the pandemic, me finishing my Bachelor and then being on the job hunt, I had regular time to write, but less.

And though I'd known that 2023 was my worst writer's block in over 15 years, seeing it proven in numbers was really startling.

245k. That's less than half of what I wrote on average for the prior three years, a third of the year before that, a fourth of the years before that. I had months where I didn't write a single word and it really reflects in the final word count.

Now comes the delightful part though! We are only in August of this year and I am already at 430k. I'm already close to having written twice as much as I did last year in total, and the year is only two-thirds over.

This really makes me happy. I know I got my grove back, I mean damn I wrote a 14k fic yesterday, start to finish, and my Writer's Month clocks in at 58k on day 12 out of 31, so yeah I know I'm writing like I'm running out of time, but seeing just how significant the improvement is to last year makes me incredibly, incredibly happy.

(I am right now at a total word count of 9.5 million. Which doesn't look like a real number tbh. A whole lot of fics got written in the past 14 years.)