I am trying to get an idea how many words I should aim for in my book. I have a number of ePub books in my Calibre library that I want to use as a guide but I cannot find anywhere on the web that will help me find how many words are in those ePub books. I though there would be some nice and simple way…
Convert them to TXT format and then run them through "wc -l " on the command line, or open the converted files with a word processor and count them that way?
Or search out submission guidelines from major publishers of your genre/demographic category and use that instead. Book 7 in the Harry Potter series is not an acceptable length for a first YA novel, for instance, so relying on the word counts of works by established authors may not be a good idea. Similarly, there are classics that are far too short for their respective markets by today’s standards.