I think these are about 190 to 195 words. That's the length of a Harlequin Desire and Amazon lists those at thereabouts.

 

My 100K novels are about 320 pages in paperback.

Based on my paperback lengths (in 5.5 x 8.5 size) and Amazon's own estimates based on word count (before I get the paperbacks up), I'd put 50K at 160 pages.

I have a 47.5K book I just finished, and I will be calling that 155 pages. Betting I'll come in extremely close to that when I do the paperback.

There does seem to be some difference as far as density on the page--how much dialogue you have, for example, vs. long passages of descriptive prose. I have LOTS of dialogue, so my page count is actually HIGHER than you might expect.

I find a good rule of thumb to be: 310-320 words/page. That seems to be how Amazon estimates. (They are estimating, from what I can tell, based on trade paperback size, more like mine, NOT on mass-market paperback size, where you'd have fewer words/page because of the much smaller trim size.)

Hope that helps.

 

My thriller Blood Alley is 50K and listed at 227 pages.

That's 220 words per page.

The book has 50 chapters, with a page break for each, and a lot of single-line and even single-word paragraphs.

 

In the "old days" 60k was 200 pages.  I still estimate like that now.

 

My 15K comes up at 60 pages.

 

One of my books is 54k, Amazon lists it at 193 pages. The paperback is 196.

 

Amazon estimates and your actual paperback size can greatly vary based on trim size, font, etc.  i.e. on my latest, Amazon lists the page count of the ebook at about 350 pages, but the 5x8 paperback comes in at about 500 pages even.

 

Amazon's estimated pg numbers based on 3 of my ebooks:

28500 = 89 pgs (320 wpp)
85900 = 261 pgs (329 wpp)
85300 = 291 pgs (293 wpp)


I have no good answer for why Book 1 and Book 2 in my trilogy have a 30pg difference when their word counts are essentially identical and they have the same front/back matter. 

 

Amazon estimates my 63k word novel at 158 pages. The paperback version is actually much longer. Their estimates seem to vary widely and generally seem to underestimate.

 

My 54k word novel (it's exactly 53,987 words) is estimated by Amazon at 175 pages. It has 5 pages of front and back matter. I use Georgia 12, 1.5 line spacing as the default.

However, I am formatting the paperback and it's coming in at 233 pages, including 19 pages of front and back matter, and blank pages. 5.25x8 trim, Garamond 11 point, 1.2 spacing, .25 indent, .750 inner and outer margins, .675 top, .475 bottom.

So, ebook (according to Amazon) is 170 pages of story text, and the actual paperback is 214 pages of story text. That's a disparity of 44 pages.

I think that Amazon takes into account actual page breaks in the ebook formatting plus some other mysterious algorithm including most common kindle readers' settings (font size, etc...).

 

What some people have found is that Amazon might not count words but filesize instead. So people with images inside their file and stuff usually get a higher estimate.

 

Check the number of pages in your upload electronic file. All my uploades to Kindle have been standard letter-size pages at single line spacing rather than book-size. I heard on an older thread a while back that if you change the page size of your .doc file uploaded that the Amazon estimate can better match.
I haven't tried this yet but it seemed like a worthy experiment on my next upload.

 

You guys are awesome. Thanks so much.

Additional data points appreciated in advance.