How many pages will my book be? A word count to page count calculator that shows its working
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R. S. Breed Founder
Your cover designer needs the spine width, and the spine width comes from the page count. So you need a page count before the interior is finished, and the usual answer ("about 250 words a page") can be out by a hundred pages.
Here's a calculator that does it properly: https://bervet.com/tools/word-count-to-page-count
Put in your word count and trim size, and choose your font size, line spacing, typeface, margins and how much dialogue the book has. You get an estimate and a likely range, plus the same book at every common trim size, so you can see what a 5.5 x 8.5 does to the page count (and the printing cost) compared with a 6 x 9.
A few things that surprised me while building it:
- Typeface matters more than you'd think. Georgia, Palatino and Book Antiqua set about 13% wider than Garamond or Times. Bookman is about 25% wider. Same words, noticeably more pages.
- Dialogue makes books longer. Every short paragraph leaves the rest of its line empty, so a dialogue-heavy thriller runs longer than a descriptive novel of the same word count.
- Chapters cost pages. Each one starts on a fresh right-hand page, often with a blank page before it.
I checked the estimates against real typesetting (five books of different sizes and styles) and they came within 6%. It also says what it's assuming next to the number, because your formatting program will be a little different. For the exact count, make your print PDF and count it, blanks included.
The result links straight to the spine width calculator and the print cost calculator with your size and page count filled in. No account needed.