They do care some about total word count, but not per page count. They do not have time to count how many words you have on each page, and again, as long as the type is easy to read, they don't necessarily care. They do not, however, require that you only have 250 words per page.

word count, usually rounding up or down from that estimate depending on how much white space an author seems to have. The 250 words per page is an average figure that publishers use for quick, rough estimates of ms. Publishers don't care how many characters you fit on a line, unless you're shoving so many on that the print size is exceedingly small (they read a lot and are trying not to go blind too early.) They also don't care how many lines that you have on a page unless again, you've squashed so many lines on the page that it's not really double-spaced and is very hard to read. Words are not usually counted as only six characters, since most words vary considerably from either side of that. The guidelines would seem to be incorrect. But the length range for a novel these days is anywhere from 20,000 words (or 40,000 depending on who you talk to,) to infinity and beyond. If you really, really are dying to know how many words a published author wrote, then you can try the page averaging trick above to get an approximation on a printed book. Most major word processing programs have a word count function that you can use, and while they aren't a 100 percent accurate, they work well enough for estimates. Then, when you reach 25,000 words, you should be at around 125 double-spaced manuscript pages. So say you discover you have 200 words per page. That gives you an average page count for yourself. To get a more accurate count, you can count the number of words in three different, full lines on a page you've written, then average the number of words per line from those three numbers, then multiply the average by the number of lines on the page.

Since the margins, typeface and number of double-spaced lines may vary from author to author, the number of words you actually have on a manuscript page may be less than 250 words or significantly more. (Don't bother with printed book pages - the typeface, margins and other production tricks will make it a painful process.) So if you'd written 25,000 words, you might have about 100 manuscript pages. A very rough standard estimate is 250 words per double-spaced manuscript page.

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