Some writers would like to see a page count estimate available in their project analytics to give them an idea of how long a published work may be.

A note from Novlr: It’s worth noting that a big argument against page counts as a length metric is that they are wildly unreliable.

The common average page count is based on Arial, 12pt, single-spaced, on an A4 sheet of paper, but this doesn’t necessarily equate to how long a published work will be. For instance if we consider 474 words of Lorem Ipsum text, based on the average page count, this is 0.7 pages. Change this to A5 paper size, and now it’s 2.7 pages. Change it to 10pt on A5, and it’s 1.8 pages. Change it to Times New Roman, 1.5 line spacing, 10pt on A5 and it's 2.1 pages.

You can see the issue there. These discrepancies are only for 474 words, so you can see how this would make manuscript lengths vary wildly depending on formatting choices. Were this to be implemented, we would need to be clear on the averages we are using for our calculations, so we welcome feedback from our writers on how best they think this could be achieved.