Word counts · 12:01am Mar 23rd, 2014
Hey everybody!
So, this is my first blogpost. And as no one is following me yet, it is more like a monologue actually. But, really, who cares?
What do I want to talk about? Numbers! Yes, numbers. I like numbers. Really, I like them. They're cool and you can do amazing things with them.
But today I want to talk about a special type of numbers: Word counts.
Before I found this page, I never saw word counts on fanfiction. Or any other texts aside from my one word documents. And actually sometimes they influence my decision if I read a story, or not. But a question popped up in my mind, that I couldn't get out of it. What exactly does the word tell me? How long is a story with 10k words? Is it already a book? Well, no. From school I remember, that roughly anything with less than 50k words is considered a shortstory. Ok, great. But here are stories, that exceeds this boundary by far. So, what about those?
Here I started to ask the all-knowing entity known as Google.
And surprisingly quick I came across arbookfind.com. Basically it is a site with a focus on education and getting children to read on their own. But what's really neat, is that they have word counts for the books in their database.
Great! Now I had some reliable base to build on to get a feeling for story lengths. And I got dumbstruck. Why, you ask? Let me tell you!
To compare word counts, I choose the Harry Potter series as a reference. I did this for several reasons. The two main reasons are:
1.) I read them. So I have a base, for how long they felt when I was reading the books.
2.) The seven books are quite different in length, so I could compare them to several of my favorites on FimFiction.
Here are the word counts of the seven Harry Potter books (UK versions):
The Philosopher's Stone: 77,325 words
The Chamber of Secrets: 84,799 words
The Prisoner of Azkaban: 106,821 words
The Goblet of Fire: 190,858 words
The Order of the Phoenix: 257,154 words
The Half-Blood Prince: 169,441 words
The Deathly Hallows: 198,227 words
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Total: 1,084,625 words
Quite a lot, right? Well, almost.
So, what I found was, that many stories on here are longer than some books from the Harry Potter series! I wouldn't have believed it beforehand. I read several stories on here, that were longer than 200k words, but never got the impression of reading a book. To me, they felt shorter than even The Philosopher's Stone. Strange, huh?
It get's even stranger... because... I got curious. And it put my mind in the mixer.
I browsed the stories without a filter and sorted them by words. And what did I find?
Glory Be by BlackRoseRaven. This story has a total of 1,039,041 words! That's only about 45k words short of the whole Harry Potter series! But that's not all. That story is only the last in a bigger story-arc, consisting of ten stories total. All stories together amount to a word count of a dazzling 4,436,936 words! <-- At this point I broke.
My congratuliations to BlackRavenRose. At least in quantity, you are ruling FimFiction (as I have not read the stories (yet?), I won't say anything about the quality).
And what I find the mostetest amazing (get out of my head right this instant Pinkie!):
It's (mostly) our private fun that's driving us to do these quite amazing things. Because that's what it is in my opinion: amazing. All the hours of work that are put into these stories, all the ideas and energy. Well, yeah... Now I'm speechless...
So, let's see the numbers rise!
*posts blog entry and waits for the viewcount to move*
If I may ask, why do the 200k word stories you mention feel shorter than Harry Potter? Is the the enjoyability level? Does that mean you enjoy the fanfic more so it flies by, or do you fail to get sucked into it so it doesn't feel gripping?
I really don't know why it feels that way for me. Probably because I have no actual pages to turn and thus the progress I make is not as easy to see compared with a book.
I think it may because people sometimes skim read I know I do sometimes. And it might be the pacing. Like if you read Lotr it would feel like FORRRRRREVERRRRRR