I have no idea what happened. I pasted in 2000+ words from Write or Die and went to check the total word count (for NaNoWriMo) on Project Stats but it came up saying I had 10 characters and 0 words. When I compiled it into a word document the document said “<<<< >>>>” and that’s it. I really don’t know. It was working just fine two days ago when I last compiled.
Ready to rip my hair out and cry, is all.
Please advise.
This just happened to me too. I re-installed the software and am still showing 0 words for a year long project.
Just to make sure we’re all on the same page here, I notice that one of your is commenting from a Mac and another from Windows, so if this isn’t a common usage problem the matter is probably coming from entirely different vectors.
However it might be a simple usage matter of not have your work in the Draft folder. The Draft is a special folder—it might be called something else if you started with a template—but you can always find it from the others because it has a special icon that looks like stack of paper with one sheet held up. This folder is used to generate material in the compiler, and so if your book has been placed somewhere else in the binder, nothing will be compiled. You’ll just get the standard End of Manuscript symbol, that “<<<>>>” stuff and maybe a cover sheet on the Mac.
Here’s what my navbar looks like. I used the “novel” template, I believe, so my understanding is that the “Manuscript” is the “Draft” folder?
Upon further inspection, the “Project Target” feature still appears to be working just fine.
And it is marked to include all the same documents compiling would, so that should mean that compiling should be counting the same documents, right?
So, I guess, since the Project Target still shows me the total word count, I could still live without the Project Stats as long as I don’t ever want to compile. :\ Which I do.
Hope this helps figure things out.
Edit: The only thing I can think of is that I’ve been trying to update my copy of Scrivener to the latest version, as prompted whenever I start it up on any computer, however, it downloads the update and goes to install it, but then is unable to complete it. No matter what computer I’m on, it always brings up an error message. Could that be why the Stats/Compile are broken?
It is doubtful that a botched installation would cause so specific a problem (generally it just wouldn’t run at all or crash repeatedly after loading). It wouldn’t be unheard of, but there are a lot of other things to check. It looks like you have everything in the draft folder correctly, so that’s fine. What you should check next, when stuff isn’t compiling, are the compile settings that govern what is visible.
This is done in two places. The first is the Contents compile option pane. You’ll need to click the blue arrow to see all options. Contents as you’ve probably guessed, is where you decide the contents of the book. Do you see all of your text items in this list? If not, is the selector above the list set to “Manuscript?” With everything in the list, view the checkboxes. Does everything have a checkmark where it is to be included in the compile?
If that all looks good, the second place that can impact the textual layout is the Formatting pane. Here you can see a grid of checkboxes for exporting certain types of material. You can turn on titles, for instance, and have Scrivener generate those for you. Along the right is a “Text” column. If none of those are checked, no text content will export, as you’d expect. So check and make sure all of that looks sane.
Thank you, AmberV! I don’t know how it got changed, but the Compile “Format as:” was set to “Custom.” On a whim, I changed it to “Novel Standard Manuscript Format” and compiled and checked and voila! 
It’s all back! And the Project Stats are all correct again.
Thank you so much! Such a little thing, and I had no idea. 
I was about to post that I had a word count problem too. It had leaped up from 72800 to 180000 suddenly. But it turns out that one of my research folders had somehow ended up in the draft folder and it was actually counting two past drafts as well as the current one. 
My mouse does go a little crazy sometimes so it’s probably something to do with that. The tiniest speck of dust and it stops responding properly.
Ha, well that’s a disappointing mistake to make. Most productive day of your life down to a slip of the mouse. 
Glad it’s all sorted now. Moral of the story: statistics are derived from the compile settings for the most part, so if you choose something like the outliner export that just dumps titles and index card contents, that make a radical change in stats. It may seem a little weird, but when you consider that some people use multiple features to output parts of their book and might use odd settings permanently, it makes more sense.