why is book length measured in words?

[king of nowhere]

just a random curiosity here, but if your purpose as an editor is gauge the amount of paper you'd need to print it, won't it be more accurate to directly count the characters? the average length of a word can change a lot (i'd hazard perhaps as much as 20%) depending on the kind of prose and one's preference for long words. and i can't think of any single reason why counting characters would be worse.

so, anyone knows? thanks

[Karger he/him]

I am not an expert on the subject but I am sitting next to someone who is...

Got it.  Considering the number of possible fonts, styles and margins the word count gives you a much better idea of how long the book is. A page count does not actually tell you anything.  The entire system is for the reader's connivance not the editors who might choose to reformat after reading anyway.

[Istiban]

I think because it gives you a better idea of the actual lenght. For example a book could have 300 pages but lot of drawings or ilustrations

[king of nowhere]

i did specifically say character count, not page count. of course page count is even more finnicky, depending also on font, character size and page size.

but both "preposterous" and "the" count as one word, yet one is four times longer than the other.

[Snorkel]

Perhaps it's an artifact from the days when we didn't have software to count words or characters for us?

[Snakenaps she/her]

If I had to take a guess, I would assume that it is because word count is a little more manageable to look at than character count. For instance, the rough draft of the book I am writing is 119,595 words or 668,947 characters. Imagine, for a moment, what the character count must be for Way of Kings, which, if I remember Brandon mentioning on Writing Excuses, is somewhere around 250,000 words. What is easier to mention to other writers, or your agent, editor, or publishing company? 250,000 words or 1,400,000 characters? 

Of course, this is a pure guess, but it the most logical one I could arrive at, based off of my own personal experience. I tried to find an answer on Google, but the Internet has failed me in the five minutes I hunted. 

[Lucky MOPper]

I think that it is based on reading speed, and it takes about the same amount of time to read each word.

[+ILuvHats he/him]

10 hours ago, Snakenaps said:

Imagine, for a moment, what the character count must be for Way of Kings, which, if I remember Brandon mentioning on Writing Excuses, is somewhere around 250,000 words

Actually, WoK is almost 400k words. A 250k book would be closer to Mistborn Era 1 or Warbreaker length.

[Snakenaps she/her]

40 minutes ago, ILuvHats said:

Actually, WoK is almost 400k words. A 250k book would be closer to Mistborn Era 1 or Warbreaker length.

Thanks for catching me! This is what I get for not fact checking before bedtime.

It only helps prove my point, though. Imagine how many characters WoK must have! 

My other thought is - and, again, this is only conjecture - that maybe we measure by word count to encourage variety and good prose. Let's take the Writers of the Future contest - you submit a story of a maximum of 17,000 words. What if they did character count instead? Then people might choose to have characters with shorter names so that they had more to write with. Maybe if we measured by character count, then Voldemort might only be Volde or something. Or the Lord Ruler only going by Lord.

But that's just my thoughts. I have nothing to back it. 

[king of nowhere]

i appreciate all the speculations, but i was hoping that maybe we could attract the attention of someone who is into the editorial process and actually knows this kind of stuff. Perhaps by summoning @PeterAhlstrom?

[Snakenaps she/her]

I hope we can catch the attention of someone who knows, because now I am incredibly interested.