To get an idea of what your book will look like you need to match the number of words per page on your word processor page to the finished printed page. This is an art rather than a science but here are a few tips.

Lines per page

For paperbacks you get 25-50 lines per page with 35 being a good average. This line count includes blank lines between paragraphs as well as lines with just a single word.

Words per page

At one extreme you get large print books with 250 words on the page. Academic books might put 600 words on a page with works of reference squeezing in 1000 words. A good working average is 400.

These figures represent continuous words with no blank lines or breaks. In practice you need to subtract 15-20% from the page word total once the white space is taken into account. This gives you 200 (large print), 500 for an academic book with 350 words per paperback page as a working average.

To put these numbers in perspective, if you type with a font size of 10, you could be packing nearly 1000 words on each A4 page - which would make nearly 3 paperback pages.

How to match the page sizes

There are 2 ways:

Notes: Figures based on:

1. Average of 3 different styles of text (5% variation).
2. Figures are for solid text so subtract 15-20% for real layout with blank lines.
3. Times Roman was used. Wide fonts such as Arial fit 7-10% fewer words per page but the same number of lines.

How to convert your file give it 'the book-look'

Practicalities

If you 'select all' (supported by most software) then adjust the font size using the chart, you will discover the number of pages your book requires.

You would be unwise to have your whole book as a single file. Computers do not like files much bigger than 100 Kilobytes. (They can handle very large files but this sort of operation might upset the machine or take a, extremely long time to carry out if the available memory is small).

Be patient. It will might take a minute to resize and adjust the layout of your chapter or book.

There is another fancy trick.

Having made the font size bigger to get the look and feel of the book, you might be able to use the fancy software that came with your printer to reduce it and print 2 or more pages on a single A4 sheet. The output might be very close to the finished size but you will still need a guillotine to cut the pages to size.

Marginal adjustment

Having dismissed the notion of adjusting the page shape, it is possible to set the aspect ratio (height to width) to a print page format you want. However, if you check your bookshelves you will find that books vary enormously in size and shape.

There is a powerful numeric logic behind this truth. The European paper sizes have 3 basic sheets, named A, B and C. These are then folded (halved along the longest side) to give A1, A2, A3 etc for the A0 sheet size. The A0 has an area of 1 square metre.

The clever mathematics of the height to width (aspect ratio) is achieved by using the 'magic' number, √2 or 1.414… Those who remember Pythagoras' Theorem about the length of the hypotenuse being equal to the sum of the squares of the other 2 sides will see that 1² + 1² =2.  So with √2 as the length of the other side you will get 2 pieces with sides that are the same length.

© writersservices.com 2002