: How do you know if you have too many words for the amount of pages you have written? I'm writing my first serious novel and I have 155 pages with 60,000 words. I'm wondering whether this

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Don't worry about the number of pages, that is dependent on the way the eventual book is typeset.

The question you want to ask, as the writer, is "do I have too many words (or too few) for the amount of story I have written." It's perfectly possible to use too many words to tell too little story, or too few words to tell too much, but the number of pages is the typesetter's problem.

When you eventually want to submit the manuscript to a publisher/agent they will let you know via their submission guidelines how they want the text formatted – for example: double-spaced, 12 point, Times New Roman, with inch-wide margins – and this will determine the ratio of words to pages.

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