How BIG is The Kraken King? (Word Count + Story Length)

Okay, yeah, that title is a total tease. But I’ve gotten several e-mails from readers asking me about the length of the story parts, because there is concern about how much story they are going to get. That’s fair; I should have listed this before. I would want to know what I’m paying for, too. So, here’s the breakdown.

PLEASE NOTE: I don’t have Part 8 finalized yet, so this includes an estimate for that part. If you aren’t familiar with word/page counts and need a comparison — a typical romance novella is about 25,000 words, and a typical novel is about 100,000 words. Printed page counts vary according to book and font size/ebook reader settings, so I’m using my manuscript page count. The word -> page proportions aren’t exact because more dialogue = more paragraphs = adds to the page count. This does NOT include the excerpts from The Iron Duke/Heart of Steel at the end of each published part.

Part 1: ~23,500 words/90 pages

Part 2: ~22,000 words/85 pages

Part 3: ~24,000 words/92 pages

Part 4: ~17,500 words/65 pages

Part 5: ~24,000 words/90 pages

Part 6: ~18,500 words/70 pages

Part 7: ~29,500 words/105 pages

Part 8 (estimated): ~22,000 words/85 pages (ETA: Final word count was ~22,400 words.)

TOTAL BOOK (estimated): ~180,000 words/677 pages (ETA: Final word count was 180,757 words.)

The parts aren’t exactly even because I had plotted out what I needed to accomplish in each part and then wrote the parts individually. Some parts took more words to do what was needed (Part 7) and some took less fewer (Part 4). When I began writing the serial, my editor suggested that each part have a length of 12,000 – 15,000 words, so that the entire serial would fall into typical novel length.

Yeah, that didn’t happen.