Since I’m an aspiring writer, I am intensely curious about some of the "inside baseball” facts of the books I read. A took a random selection of Kindle books (the ones that just happened to be on my hard drive at the time) and figured out the approximate word count for each book when converted to plain text.** In the table below, the number of pages is as shown by Amazon.
| Author | Book |
Words |
Pages |
| Robert Jordan | The Shadow Rising |
396k |
1051 |
| Terry Goodkind | Stone of Tears |
393k |
996 |
| Brandon Sanderson | The Way of Kings |
383k |
1009 |
| Robert Jordan | The Fires of Heaven |
356k |
926 |
| George R.R. Martin | A Clash of Kings |
334k |
1040 |
| Terry Goodkind | Wizard’s First Rule |
305k |
*580 |
| Jacqueline Carey | Kushiel’s Dart |
278k |
934 |
| Robert Jordan | The Dragon Reborn |
253k |
632 |
| John Brown | Servant of a Dark God |
179k |
624 |
| Fred Saberhagen | The First Book of Swords |
85k |
219 |
* I am not sure what is up with Terry Goodkind’s Kindle books, but they seem very screwed up. I’m pretty sure that book had more than 580 pages.
Another question that comes up among writers a lot is: How long should my chapters be? Obviously there’s no right answer, but here is how long the first three chapters (not counting prologues) are in the above books:
| Book |
Ch. 1 |
Ch. 2 |
Ch. 3 |
| The Shadow Rising |
15.8k |
15.1k |
7.3k |
| Stone of Tears |
2.8k |
3.9k |
6.3k |
| The Way of Kings |
4.5k |
5.0k |
5.2k |
| The Fires of Heaven |
13.9k |
9.1k |
7.1k |
| A Clash of Kings |
2.5k |
4.8k |
5.6k |
| Wizard’s First Rule |
2.5k |
5.2k |
6.7k |
| Kushiel’s Dart |
2.7k |
2.7k |
3.3k |
| The Dragon Reborn |
4.1k |
4.8k |
3.5k |
| Servant of a Dark God |
2.4k |
2.2k |
1.5k |
| The First Book of Swords |
5.3k |
8.0k |
5.5k |
I don’t know about anyone else, but at least now I know why it took so frickin’ long to read The Shadow Rising.
** Don’t ask how I did it.
P.S. For comparison, the longest novel I have written is 138k words, and my chapters tend to be between 2k and 4k words. I suck. :)
