Happy New Year! You know, I think I’m the only weirdo who likes to know the word-counts of other novels. I don’t even think I can articulate why I like to find how many words are in a book.
I wonder if it’s when I read something I love, I want to know how many words it took to achieve something so special? Or for example, if I was so engrossed that I read it quickly, it’s interesting to learn that actually, the book was longer than I thought.
The more I look back at those two paragraphs the more I think that yes, this is probably just a strange obsession I have!
Anyway, if you want a reasonably reliable way of figuring out the word count of a book, I’ve got you covered.
Amazon in the US used to have word counts for thousands of books, but that information has long-since gone. But if you are curious like I am, Amazon and Audible can still help.
Go to Audible/Amazon. If there is an unabridged audiobook version of the novel you want the word-count for, click on the page for it. It’ll give you the running-time somewhere.
Convert the running-time into minutes. So for example, a book that’s 12 hours and 35 minutes long = 755 minutes.
The rough average speaking-speed is about 150 words a minute. I can tell you that’s a standard in the voiceover world, having worked in the VO business for many years. So multiply the number of minutes by 150 and you have a fairly decent approximate word count. So in our example, 755 x 150 = 113,250 words.
And there you are!
Andy Jones Online 