Every submission guideline, every printing quote and every reader expectation starts with one number, and this word count tool hands it to you the moment you paste. Drop your draft in below and see it straight away, alongside the sentence and paragraph detail most counters leave out.
Type or paste, and every figure below updates on the spot.
A word is any run of letters or digits, so hyphenated compounds such as half-finished register as two, exactly as most publishers count them. Sentences are closed by a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark. Paragraphs are separated by a blank line, or by a single line break where no blank lines exist.
Reading time assumes 238 words per minute, the average silent reading speed for adult prose in published research. Read-aloud pace for audiobook narration is far slower, closer to 150 words per minute.
Word count is the first thing an agent checks, the figure a printer turns into a page extent and a unit cost, and the number that quietly tells a reader whether they are picking up a weekend read or a commitment. It is the one measurement that follows a manuscript from first draft through to the price on the back cover.
The trouble is that counters disagree. Word processors, submission portals and print estimators each apply slightly different rules to hyphens, numerals, headings and footnotes, which is why the same file can return three different totals. This tool follows the convention most publishers use: any unbroken run of letters or digits counts as one word.
Beyond the headline total there is far more worth knowing. Sentence and paragraph counts reveal the rhythm of a passage, unique word count hints at how varied your vocabulary really is, and the longest sentence in a chapter is very often the one an editor will circle first.
Cover blurbs, retailer descriptions and metadata fields usually cap you on characters including spaces, while some typesetting estimates ignore them. Both totals are shown so you never have to guess which limit you are up against.
Divide unique words by total words and you get a rough measure of lexical variety. A low ratio across a long passage often means a handful of favourite verbs are carrying more weight than they should.
One runaway sentence can stall an otherwise clean page. Seeing its length in words tells you instantly whether a passage needs splitting, or whether the length is a deliberate effect you want to keep.
The estimate uses 238 words per minute, the average silent reading speed measured across adult prose. If you are planning an audiobook, expect a narrator to move at roughly 150 words per minute instead.
Word count tells you how much you have written. Professional typesetting decides how it reads on the page, and whether a printer accepts the file first time.
Ranges publishers and agents actually work to. Treat them as guide rails rather than hard rules.
| Book type | Usual word count | Reader age | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Picture book | 500 - 1,000 | 3 - 7 | Illustration carries most of the story; brevity is the craft. |
| Chapter book | 5,000 - 12,000 | 6 - 9 | Short chapters, generous leading, frequent line art. |
| Middle grade | 25,000 - 55,000 | 8 - 12 | Longer for fantasy, shorter for contemporary. |
| Young adult | 55,000 - 90,000 | 12 - 18 | Above 100,000 usually needs a fantasy or dystopian premise. |
| Adult novel | 70,000 - 110,000 | Adult | The commercial sweet spot for most fiction genres. |
| Epic fantasy | 110,000 - 200,000 | Adult | Accepted only where the world-building genuinely demands it. |
It will be very close, and usually identical for straightforward prose. Small gaps appear around hyphenated compounds, numerals with symbols and text inside headers or footnotes. Where a submission specifies a source, quote the figure from that source rather than any third-party tool.
No. The counting runs entirely in JavaScript inside your own browser tab, so nothing is transmitted to a server and nothing is saved. Close the tab and the text is gone, which makes it safe for unpublished or contracted work.
As separate words. A compound such as blue-green registers as two, which is the convention most publishing houses apply. If your target guideline counts them as one, expect your total here to run very slightly higher.
Sentences are detected by terminal punctuation. Dialogue that ends in a dash, fragments without full stops, and list items on separate lines without punctuation will merge into whatever follows them. Poetry and screenplay formatting tend to be undercounted for the same reason.
For most adult fiction genres, somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 words is the safest range for a debut. Coming in far under suggests the story is underdeveloped, and coming in far over raises print costs on a book nobody has taken a risk on yet.
For a standard 6 by 9 inch trade paperback, budget roughly 280 to 300 words per page once you allow for chapter openers, part titles and blank versos. A 90,000 word novel therefore lands somewhere near 300 to 320 printed pages.
No, it assumes steady linear reading of continuous prose. Technical writing, reference material and anything with tables or footnotes will take considerably longer, because readers stop, reread and cross-check as they go.
Yes. The tool handles book-length files comfortably, though very large pastes may take a moment to recalculate on older devices. For chapter-by-chapter breakdowns, our chapter length analyzer splits the same file into per-chapter totals.
When the writing is done, the typesetting begins. We take your manuscript file and return interior files built to your printer's exact trim, margin and bleed specification, with running heads, chapter openers and a table of contents that behaves.
See Print Book Formatting