(no subject)

[alexseanchai]

anarchycox:

Petition for ao3 to have the feature that you can click on word count and it will tell you how many pages that would be in a published novel so that you can properly assess the stupid decision you are about to make at 11:45pm

alexseanchai:

I bet making that userscript wouldn’t be difficult

like there’s one for calculating the kudos:hits ratio and displaying that next to or instead of the hit count, so making one to divide the word count by 250, round up to the nearest integer, and display the resulting page count next to the word count definitely sounds doable

alexseanchai five minutes later:

say how does one code a tampermonkey script

three hours after that:



[image: an AO3 screenshot of my shiny new AO3: Page Count script in action. The Ladybugs and the Bees is 507 pages long, When Duty and Desire Meet is 232 pages so far, and heartstrings is 174 pages. also visibly active on this page: the AO3: Kudosed and seen history and AO3: Kudos/hits ratio scripts by Min.]

Comments

[niqaeli]

neat!

(I personally am slightly bemused at the notion of published pages being more useful than wordcount for calibrating how unwise the decision you are making at 23:45 is. I can see how it could be! But I am still bemused. ....but I mean, once upon a time I could judge wisdom based on file size; it's been a long time since I had to do that and I have forgotten it all, but I could at one point.)

[alexseanchai]

I mean

also when I linked my tumblr post in one of my Discords all tada emoji, the first response: I’m always surprised when I open my own stuff in a document so glad to see that that kind of visualization alludes more than just me

[niqaeli]

Oh HEY, this is probably related to both how I can re-balance scheduling books on the fly and to how I do time management professionally. That actually makes a lot more sense, now.

(I don't actually do arithmetic for either, particularly the professional time management, because it's *incredibly* stressful for me to try to to deal with numbers. Instead I do visual and/or mental representations of various discrete chunks of stuff and manipulate *those*. But that sort of visualisation is, I have gathered, not a universal thing at all! Which is why I was bemused even though I could see the potential utility for other people of putting it into a more familiar context.)

[alexseanchai]

nodnod 😺

[raine]

HLFiction.net has this for calculating length:
Novels: Stories of 50,000 words or more.
Novellas: Stories between 25,000 and 49,999 words.
Short Stories: Stories between 501 and 24,999 words.
Ficlets: Stories and drabbles of 500 words or fewer.

[alexseanchai]

yup! but that does not really address the thing anarchycox wanted, because all three of the stories in my screenshot up there are novel-length, it's just that the first is more than twice as long as the second and almost three times as long as the third. which is apparently more easily visualized in terms of reading time when calculated in terms of printed page count.

also glaring at javascript for three hours in hopes of making a random tumblrite happy is not exactly the least productive evening I've spent this month, so.

[raine]

Ah. I used to use 250 words = 1 page printed as my old "judge how many pages this thing will require", but I can see where doing it your way would be useful as well. :-)

[graycardinal]

At the risk of bringing up things you may well already know:

The page count you'll get from using the 250 words/page figure actually more closely reflects what your [story-like object] would look like as an old-school paper submission manuscript than it does the page count of a printed book (because "proper manuscript format" is a carefully standardized thing, whereas printed books can be more flexible in terms of font, type size, line spacing, and other design elements).

Old-school editors are trained in a technique called "cast off" by which they can convert mansucript length to printed-page length; that technique is more arcane than you'd think, and accounts for variables including proportion of dialogue to description and short vs. long dialogue (lots of short single-sentence paragraphs take up more space than a paragraph of scene-setting).

The word counts given for HLFiction vary a bit from what I've seen (the Hugo and Nebula rules recognize novels as over 40K words, novellas as 17,501-40K, novelettes as 7,501-17,500, and short stories as 7,500 words or less). That said, 40K-50K has until very recently been way too short for book-length publishing, although Seanan McGuire's "Wayward Children" books have been treated as novellas for award-rules purposes.

As an actual-practice guide: the average genre-SF/F novel tends to clock in at 100K-150K words. The last conventional wisdom I saw, which may be dated now, says that 90K-120K is the sweet spot for a novelist breaking into professional publication. Those figures are also generally accurate for genre mystery. YA nowadays may run as short as 50K-60K words on up to adult length (and best-selling authors will have an easier time writing long than newer authors will).

Category romance (i.e. Harlequin in North America, Mills/Boone in the UK) runs shorter, in the 70K-90K range -- perhaps as low as 60K for some lines -- and is more strict about holding to agreed word-length due to the shape of that market.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I've done cast off, but for text books. There it takes into account equations and pictures/diagrams. (This was a very long time ago, when files weren't submitted.)

more that you may (both) know:

[redbird]

And again for publishing purposes, people who say than something is X number of pages long may be looking at MS Word layout (in which case, their choices of font size etc. are crucial), and may be using "pages" of 200, 225, or 250 words. That matters if you're hiring/being hired as an editor -- if one person's "page" is 250 words, and the other's is 200, you'll come up with different ideas of how long it will take to edit or proofread 200 pages, and what to charge for it.

Re: more that you may (both) know:

[alexseanchai]

I put 350 in as the default words-per-page for calculation purposes, but anyone who installs the script can edit their copy to use whatever number they like.

[emperor]

I've never written anything long enough to need this, but nice work :)

[alexseanchai]

😺

[kaberett]

(e-mail address showing up in a field is usually a browser extension trying to Hlepfully autofill)

[alexseanchai]

yeah but LastPass doesn't have my email in any of my Dreamwidth login data, and also deleting the contents of the field didn't stick

[silveradept]

Yay for a useful script! Maybe it can join some of the other AO3-related scripts, as well, because I'm sure a lot of people would love to have an approximate page count to calculate approximate read times from.

[alexseanchai]

I do not have enough nerve to submit the link to Support for inclusion on the Unofficial Browser Tools FAQ

[longmagpieroads]

okay I totally wheezegiggled my way through this. I made the mistake of drinking tea and reading it.

[alexseanchai]

Min did the hard parts! I was basically reverse-engineering the kudos:hits ratio script like, okay let's cut out the bits I don't need, crap I actually needed some of those, wait it's not working right on pages that display a comma in the word count, let me figure out how to fix that text before converting it to a number…

[niqaeli]

That's how most people get started programming, is one of the best ways TO get started programming, and in fact more than a few actual IT professionals make their living doing pretty much exactly that kind of work.

Which is not to say you shouldn't acknowledge the work that the people whose code you used/learned from did, obviously, but that I would like to gently remind you that your own work on it should not be dismissed as unimportant or easy. <3

[alexseanchai]

😸

[jesse_the_k]

Nifty!