Word Counts Are More Accurate Now

If your word count looks lower today, that is expected — and for most books, it is good news.

When you paste from Word, Google Docs, Scrivener, or your favorite editor, BetaBooks keeps simple formatting like bold and italics. The problem was that our counter was also counting some of that invisible formatting as words: link addresses, markup, and other bits that are not really part of your prose. It was also treating curly apostrophes — in contractions like can’t or possessives like Harry’s — as word breaks, so one word could count as two. On a long manuscript, both issues could add thousands of words. One author reported more than 104,000 in BetaBooks versus about 100,000 in Word. Thank you to them for writing in.

We fixed how word counts are calculated and recalculated existing books on the site. It may not match your editor exactly every time, but it should be much closer to the words your readers actually see.

This started with user feedback, and we want to keep listening. If something feels off, please let us know.

— Pedro