Words per Page: Why 275 and 475 Are Both Right

A 6 by 9 inch book page set in 11 point type holds about 275 words if it is set with generous margins and extra leading, and about 456 if it is set tight. Same paper, same typeface, same size of type.

That gap explains why the answers you find online never agree. A popular calculator for self-publishers works with 275. A book designer tells authors to divide by 475. I wanted to know whether one of them was wrong, so I set Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice into four of Amazon’s paperback trim sizes, twice each, and counted what ended up on the page.

Words per page by trim size

The four sizes come from the trim sizes Amazon KDP offers for paperbacks. KDP also calls 6 by 9 the most common paperback size in the US. The typeface is Palatino at 11 point in every row.

The character columns are the measurement. The word columns divide them by 5.60, which is the average length of an English word plus its space in this blog’s own articles, a figure explained in the piece on the standard manuscript page. Write longer words than that and the word columns shrink. The character columns don’t move.

Where 275 comes from, and where 475 comes from

Both published figures turn out to have a page behind them.

KDPEasy’s word count calculator assumes roughly 275 words for 6 by 9, 240 for 5.5 by 8.5 and 200 for 5 by 8, based on 11 point Times New Roman with 1.15 line spacing and normal margins. Hold those against the open column: 275, 243, 204. The calculator is describing an open page almost to the word.

Raven Book Design has authors divide their word count by 390 for fiction at 5.5 by 8.5 and by 475 for nonfiction at 6 by 9, set in 11 point Garamond with standard margins and indented paragraphs. My tight column says 381 and 456, less than 5 percent away. That difference is smaller than the one a change of typeface makes on its own, as you will see further down.

So nobody is wrong. They are measuring different books. On the same 6 by 9 sheet, the tight page carries two thirds more text than the open one, 2,552 characters against 1,541. Before you divide anything, decide which of the two books you are making. If you can’t decide yet, work with both numbers and treat the distance between them as your margin of error.

Past 6 by 9, a bigger page mostly buys margin

Look down the tight column once more. From 6 by 9 to 7 by 10 the paper grows by 30 percent, the text by 7 percent. Both pages run 39 lines.

What stops the page from filling up is the line. Matthew Butterick recommends an average line length of 45 to 90 characters, including spaces, because on a long line the eye has further to travel back to find the start of the next one. The tight type areas stay well inside that range. Measured lines run 52.6 characters at 5 by 8, 65.4 at 6 by 9 and 69.9 at 7 by 10. Beyond that, extra paper goes into the margins.

The open setting behaves differently because it holds the type area at two thirds of the page whatever the size. Its 7 by 10 page gains more than a quarter over 6 by 9 and still has comfortable lines of 63.9 characters. Two settings, two answers to the question of what a bigger sheet is for.

One point of type size is worth a whole trim size

Every row here is the tight 6 by 9 page again, with one setting changed.

The second row holds a coincidence worth pausing on. At 12 point the 6 by 9 page takes 2,132 characters. The 5.5 by 8.5 page at 11 point, second row of the first table, also takes 2,132. Move up one trim size and one point of type at the same time and you have changed the cover, not the page count.

Typeface is the lever nobody sees. Times runs narrow, Century Schoolbook wide, and 15 percent of the page lies between them. A reader never notices, because nobody holds two editions side by side.

And even one fixed setting gives you a range rather than a number. The 16 pages I counted for the first row held anywhere from 425 to 494 words. Every paragraph that ends early leaves the rest of its line empty, and some pages simply have more paragraph endings on them.

Your prose is a setting too

Characters per page belong to the layout. Words per page don’t, because your words have a length of their own.

Doyle’s page holds 3 percent fewer characters than Austen’s and 3 percent more words. His words are shorter, that’s all.

The third row is the one to remember if you write a lot of dialogue. Same novel, same typeface, same page, and a third of the text has gone. The sample for that row has 874 short paragraphs where the first one has 60 long ones, and the average line drops from 65.4 characters to 44.4. A thriller that lives in dialogue should be estimated from the bottom of any range on this page.

From word count to page count

Say your novel runs 90,000 words. At 5.60 characters per word that makes 504,000 characters, and dividing by characters per page gives the pages, rounded up. Set tight at 11 point it comes to 198 pages on 6 by 9. Open at 11 point, 328. Open at 12 point, where 1,364 characters fit on a page, 370.

Add what the text block leaves out. A chapter starts on a fresh page and leaves on average half of its last page empty, so 30 chapters cost about 15 pages. Half title, title page, copyright page and contents are four more before chapter one.

Then the page count starts feeding back on itself. KDP asks for an inside margin that grows with the book: 0.375 inches up to 150 pages, 0.5 up to 300, 0.625 up to 500, 0.75 up to 700 and 0.875 up to 828. Going from the first of those tiers to the third takes a quarter of an inch off every line. On the tight 6 by 9 page that is about three and a half characters, which over 39 lines comes to 25 words a page. A thicker book gets narrower lines and grows thicker still.

If you are working backwards from a page target to a daily word count, the writing goal calculator does the division for you. Whether pages are worth tracking at all is a separate question, taken up in words, hours or pages.

The 250 rule describes a typewriter page

Ask how many words fit on a page and someone will say 250. William Shunn, author of the Proper Manuscript Format guide, traces the number to the typewriter, where ten characters took up exactly an inch and about 25 double-spaced lines fitted on a page. Change any of those factors, he writes, and “the estimate of 250 words per page no longer holds”. His advice is to stop estimating and use the word count your computer gives you.

Notice which page that was. A double-spaced manuscript page, the kind you send to an editor. The 250 was never a statement about printed books. Every tight page in the first table holds more than that, and the open pages below 6 by 9 hold less.

How the numbers were measured

A script in this blog’s repository takes public domain text from Project Gutenberg, typesets it with LuaLaTeX in the chosen trim size, pulls the text back out of every finished PDF page and counts characters, words and lines. The first and last page of each run are dropped because they are never full. KOMA-Script derives the tight type area from paper size and type size, so the margins follow a documented construction and not my eye. The binding allowance is 8 millimetres throughout.

I ran the English series twice, on 26 and 28 September 2026, on two different TeX installations. The tight counts in the first table came out the same to the decimal both times, and so did the open 6 by 9 page.

One caveat. KOMA-Script picks its type area from a whole-number scale, and at some sizes it jumps. At 10 point it hands the 6 by 9 page a wider type area than at 11, with lines of 72.5 characters. A row like that says more about the heuristic than about type size, so it stays out of the tables. The open column sidesteps the problem by fixing the type area at the same share of every page.

Where these numbers stop working

They cover running prose in a single column. Headings, images, block quotes and footnotes take their space out of the page, so a nonfiction book with a subhead every few paragraphs will come in below its row.

Large print is a case of its own. At 14 point the 5 by 8 page holds 956 characters, and its lines shrink to 38.2 characters, under Butterick’s minimum of 45. The 6 by 9 page at 14 point gets back to 48.3 characters a line and 1,448 a page. Large print needs a bigger trim, not just bigger letters.

Two-column layouts, poetry and ebooks fall outside the tables as well. An ebook has no fixed page, since the reader chooses the type size. Handwritten pages have their own measurement in words per handwritten page.

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