I have been researching how to convert computer pages (I'm using Word) to novel pages. There is a lot of conflicting info, so I was wondering if any of you had done the same and found more conclusive formulas.

I know that it depends on the size of the books, the font, and so forth, but I'm just looking for a rough estimate.

I always calculate the length of my books in terms of word count. 250 words per page is the industry standard. So the word count of your book divided by 250 ought to give a pretty accurate number...

I ran into this issue a few years back, when I wanted to enter some pieces in a contest asking for your "first page"---I carefully pared everything down to the first manuscript page (in my case about 650 words), only to find the actual word count limit was about 250 words. (My blog post about the experience is here, if anyone cares to read it.) I'd guess that 250 words is a quite low but reasonable estimate of a mass-market paperback page; a trade paperback or hardback page will be more.

But since you're in a word processor already: Find a book of the size you're interested in (the books CreateSpace and such produce are trade paperbacks; if you don't have a book of the size you're curious about to hand, feel free to ask someone here or elsewhere ), measure its dimensions and the margins on a typical page, then temporarily change the paper size and the margins in your Word document. The number of Word pages it takes up is a reasonable estimate.

I'm of the opinion that page counts are far inferior to word counts as a measurement; nearly any high school or college student knows various tricks for subtly increasing or decreasing page count by fiddling with margins, font size, line spacing, and the like, and from my experience helping catalog our family's book collection I know that publishers have done much the same thing (e.g. in the war years when paper was rationed). But if you need a page count for a text you have, there's no substitute for experiment, and it's easy enough to do one. (And for writing to a page count limit ... I'd try that experiment with the output of one of those "lorem ipsum" dummy-text generators.)

Yeah. My word count is 120,000 words, and I know that is the most accurate "measurement" of a project. I'm just curious about how many pages that would equate to.

So thanks, guys, for your suggestions on how to figure out the page count.

I think 30,000 words tends to roughly equal 100 pages in an adult novel, so 120,000 would roughly equal 400 pages. But of course it varies...

I don't know much about this, but I do think that the 250 words a page thing sounds about right (Goes to count number of words on books)

I'm interested in hearing other people's answers.

Someone from here (HolyWorlds) posted a link to one of K.M. Weiland's blog posts a while back, and I've been listening to her podcasts.

January 10th, 2010's one was titled Why Word Count Goals Can Be Destructive. In it, she says that she was trying to write 800 words per day - approximately 1 page a day.

Because of the previous stating that 250 words was 'industry standard', I think the phrasing was, I was wondering if anyone else had any new/updated opinions on how many words equal one page.

I once counted the number of pages on a Star Trek: Relaunch novel, and it was exactly 250 pages (I think it was not counting the hyphenated words, which Microsoft Word counts as one)

Industry standard is still 250 words per page. I suspect that the discrepency here is between MS Word pages and actual book pages. She was probably talking about the pages as they appear in MS Word (which, depending on font size etc., could easily be ~800 words.)