How Many Pages Should A Manuscript Contain?

A Writer’s Storm: Writing For Passion or Money, Publishing Kindle Books, Self-publishing, or Traditional Print Publishing.  By — James C. Tanner

How Many Pages Should A Manuscript Contain?

How Many Pages Should A Manuscript Contain? — In my early days, I struggled in understanding how to properly structure a book. Today one of the most common questions I am asked pertains to the number of pages in a manuscript.  To properly address this topic we must break down the topic one step further to the actual number of words.

A traditional publishing house accepting manuscripts on adult related topics will seek a manuscript which is no less than 90,000 words and no greater than 100,000 words. A finished manuscript with this word count would typically be in the 400+ page length. This would allow for 250 to 300 words per page.

Manuscripts written to a teen audience should not exceed 50,000 words or 200 manuscript pages.

How Many Pages Should A Manuscript Contain?

Manuscripts written for digital publication on services such as Amazon’s Kindle are best kept to 8000 to 10000 words or 34 pages. Larger books can be submitted and often are, but there is a little known reason as to why less is more when it comes to online books.

People who use the internet heavily for surfing as well as reading online, read on average only 20 pages per month. Large e-books are often never finished by the average e-book reader.

All paper manuscripts should be written in a 12 point Times New Roman font. Digital submissions are best written in Georgia or Arial fonts to accommodate eReader’s such as Kindle Fire’s abilities to present fonts.

Your chapters should be limited to a maximum of 10 pages, and it’s even better if you are publishing digitally, for your chapters be smaller, around 4 to 8 pages. Today’s reader reads in spurts, and whenever possible they prefer to surf content rarely taking time to read every word or every sentence. This will vary from one age group demographic to another, and from one gender to another. Frequent chapter breaks do make it a lot easier for your reader to remember where they left off.

Never forget, we write for the reader’s convenience, not our own. We must do our research and understand who we are writing to then structure our manuscript accordingly.

 

Author — James C. Tanner