I don’t know why it should matter to me, but in my quest to write my book, I am almost endlessly fascinated with other books’ word counts. I think it has something to do with judging my progress against other books that have been successful. *shrug*
I used to go by anecdotal evidence. For instance, someone once told me that Harry Potter I had 75,000 words. I’ve been going by that barometer, figuring that for a popular kid’s book, it was safely over the 40,000 word limit where it gets dismissed as a novella, yet was safely under the 100,000 word limit where kids are scared of it. I’ve been aiming at 75K ever since, figuring that was somewhat of a golden mean.
Well. I no longer have to go by anecdotal evidence. Amazon, on books enabled with the Search Inside function, has a very useful link, almost buried in the book info: TEXT STATS.
See THIS ONE for Bridge to Terabithia. It tells you the 100 most used words in the book, and how the book ranks in terms of ease of readability, complexity, and number of text characters, words, and sentences.
I didn’t know this function was there, and I’m betting you didn’t either.
Just for fun, I thought I’d present a few books and their word counts here:
Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson: 33,000
Lord of the Rings trilogy, JRR Tolkien: 470,000
The Stand, Stephen King: 462,000
Charlotte’s Web, EB White: 31,000
A Series of Unfortunate Events: A Bad Beginning, Lemony Snickett: 24,000
Unfortunately, many books at Amazon do not yet have this Search Inside feature, so I’m still stuck with anecdotal info on Harry Number One. However, the stats come from the Harry Potter Lexicon, a fan-run treasure trove of information. Knowing fans, I imagine they hand-counted each word, so this is probably very accurate.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: 76,944
Looks like my novel’s on track to hit that mark as well.
WORD COUNT: 66,500
