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I've seen a lot of discussion about this in a couple of different writer's forums I belong to, and I made a point of writing down a consensus that many of them seemed to reach. While the actual word counts will vary and everybody will have different opinions on what the count should be, this should help to serve as a general guide. Short story - under ...

It's hard to say; length is usually measured by word count and not page count or thickness. Layout and font choice can change the number of pages a book has without changing the length of it. That being said, I believe 50,000 words is still the minimum to scratch by as a novel, though most run between 75k and 100k words of late, though it used to be ...

Count how many words are on a page or two. It's alright to guess, but try to get it about right. Multiply that by 200. Now you have your wordcount estimate, which is the standard way to talk about a book's length. Contemporary novels tend to go about 80-100k, fantasy gets to be a bit longer, while YA fiction tends to cap at 75k. If you have 200 words on ...

Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress. These are desktop publishing programs, which are designed to do exactly what you want to do (among many other things): lay out printed pieces like a magazine.

If you are looking for software to use for making a magazine, I would recommend Scribus. It is open source desktop publishing software that is free. I haven't used it myself, but I know a couple of people who use it for a newsletter, and they really like it.

A quick look at Baen and I found their Manuscript Submission Guidelines: Preferred length: 100,000 - 130,000 words Generally we are uncomfortable with manuscripts under 100,000 words, but if your novel is really wonderful send it along regardless of length.

Word counts offered by publishers are guide lines. Enough -good words- to tell the story and keep the attention of the audience. Some folks want to pronounce some magic word count/page count and will will bemoan my answer as wrong. So it goes. How many manuscript pages/word count are in Joyce's Ulysses? Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow? Pynchon's Crying of ...

If you want to look up by both title and date, I'd list each entry as: [Entry title] [Entry date] [Page Number] where "Page Number" refers to your existing 2-page numbering. You'll have no trouble finding the entry you're looking for once you've opened up the right 2 pages...

Technically, 50k and up is a novel, but in most genres for adults, 80k is the minimum. Novellas (20k-50k) tend to be very hard to sell because there aren't many markets that even look at them--they're too short to be books and too long to fit in a magazine. However, with ebooks, length restrictions are being relaxed by some publishers, and novellas can be ...

No there isn't. If you are contributing stories to a magazine, paper or a collection of short stories the editor might have an upper limit and you can ask him or her about it. If you are writing a novel, there is no preset limit. Most classics we read today were originally published in bits on newspapers of those days. You can follow one JKR did with Harry ...

I'm afraid the only answer here is "as long as needed". The story must captivate you, the writer, enough that the characters fight for their time share, appear for their specific purposes, linger in the background creating the mood, surprise us with their reappearances, break the mold, capture our hearts, capture your heart. You spend on each just enough ...

Don't be afraid of white space. It's easier for comprehension not to break a paragraph or sentence mid-thought. I would rather have a big chunk of white space at the bottom of a page and then see the table at the top of the next page, where it made sense in the flow of reading, than have to interrupt my reading to double back and look at a graphic. Put the ...

If a character appears only at the beginning and in the end then you need to devote sufficient time and space to ensure that the readers remember him (or her) when he reappears but not so much that they wonder why he was not more prominent in the middle of the story. You cannot think of this in terms of number of words because that takes no account of the ...