Page counts vs real published fiction

I got curious last night as to exactly how my stories stacked up to standard mass-market paperbacks for length.  It turns out that the pages dimensions I’ve been using so far are much larger than what the authors I look up to are using.  So, to derive the settings below, I actually typed in a page from a Baen novel and adjusted my settings until the page I’d typed in was lined up almost exactly the way it was in the paperback.

So when I use these settings in my word processor, the page count reflects about how many pages they’d be if printed in a conventional paperback format:

  • 10-point Roman font
  • A6 paper size (4.13″ x 5.83″)
  • Left / right margins 0.25″
  • Top / bottom margins 0.39″

So, using these settings, here are the lengths of the stories I’ve written:

  • Morgan’s Curse would be 82 pages complete.
  • Progenitor: Origin is presently 142 pages, and is about 70% complete.
  • Merlin’s Magic Wang is 23 pages complete.

In other news, if I were to go by word count, it turns out that the page I checked had 275 words on it.


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