Posts Tagged Words

Word Counts and Why They Don’t Matter

Posted by Bryan Caron in Books, How To, Novel, Short Story, Writing on October 18, 2016

average-word-count

It happens quite often. I’ll come upon a post on Facebook or Twitter of an author referencing word counts in some way.

How many words are too many words?

What’s the correct word count for ?

How many words should there be per chapter?

Should I split my book into two to keep the word counts down?

I have to add/shave ‘x’ amount of words to reach my target number.

This ominous pressure to land the perfect word count for a book or genre for the sheer purpose of writing the “perfect” book really ruffles my feathers. There tends to be a big misnomer out there that if a book in a certain genre is too long, no one will read it, or if a book is too short, readers will think they’re getting jipped. Now, I’m sure there are plenty of readers out there who hate books that are longer than a certain number of pages, or won’t fork out $0.99 for a short story, but the majority of readers, I’m sure, care more about reading a good, strong, compelling story as opposed to how long it may or may not be. And though many a teacher may agree and profess that word counts are the end all, be all of writing, I’m from the school that word counts do not matter one iota. And I’ll tell you why. Read Full Article

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