Inventing Reality: A Guide to Writing Science Fiction

When you’re deciding where to send your story for publication, pay close attention to the directions about word counts. Editors have only so much space for a story, and if your story goes over the word count, it won’t fit the space and so likely will be rejected. It’s a rare story in a rare situation that exceeds word counts and is accepted for publication.

Determining word count is not quite as easy as hitting a button on your word processor. While that word count method is satisfactory for submitting your story, remember that editors and publishers traditionally count words in a different way. A word processing program counts a word as a set of letters with spaces around them. Because of that, your word processing program would say that the first sentence of this entry contains 19 words. In the past, however, a “word” was every five characters, regardless of where the spaces were. This gave a count that better matched the amount of physical space available on a page. By that method, this entry’s first sentence contains 20 words.

One word isn’t much of a difference. But over a 10 typed pages, the difference can cost you a paragraph. So be prepared to be edited for length.

Another quick note: when determining word counts, do not include what appears in your manuscript’s headers, only the actual text from the first to the last word of the story.