Which do you pay more attention to, honestly?
Everyone tells you that it doesn't matter for one reason or another, but after some of the things I've found when looking up stuff for publishing, it does in fact.
There is a recommended page count for first time publishers, and each genre can veer from that. I've read that it is very rare for a publisher to take on a manuscript longer than 100k words (100,000) - That you'll have a better chance when 80k words (80,000) or below.
BUT
Agents and publishers in the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres want books that fall into the higher word-count end of adult fiction. I've read that most would agree that they would consider a manuscript up to 100,000 words for a first-time submission.
The higher word-count exceptions they publish are usually books written by authors who have an established track record of sales, which started with shorter books. So those big ones you hear of like Stephen King, George R. R. Martin, and J.K Rowling, all started by selling much shorter works.
Here is where I came to my crossroads.
Shy Walking Shadows was originally written in... Well, it was started in a notebook, then went to computer when it outgrew what the pages could hold. It first got typed up in a Word program, but then got bounced around till it ended up in WordPad.
Now, if you've never written in WordPad - and know nothing on how to fiddle its inner workings, if it were possible, it was just one long, never-ending document. That's how it ended up being. So when I first started, I had no page or word counter to go by.
From there, it got transferred over to OpenOffice, where I was able to modify things a bit more. Oh, and I should probably mention, WordPad does not save Italics, so all that had to be redone. It was also a size 10 Calibri font, that it was determined it was going to stay on. Once moved over, I was able to get it into the size 12 Times New Roman.
At first, it didn't have a page or word count either, and I didn't know how to change it to where it would, but a friend assisted on that part, enabling page count for me. By the end of the first editing go-through I did, this is what I ended up with:
495 pages - Feb. 26th 2019
When I moved it onto Google Docs to be able to run Grammarly through it and do some editing, the spacing on it got all screwed up, so when I got it back onto OpenOffice, it still had that screwy spacing, leaving me with this:
595 Pages - April 2nd 2020
That's what it is currently. Jumped up a whole hundred pages.
Granted I've since been going through and doing some editing/fixing and whatnot, but nothing super major.
I don't have a word count for the OpenOffice document, just what I have on Wattpad, and it's counter is really weird. It will say one number, I'll save and preview it, then go back and it says different, several numbers higher.
I won't be able to get a definitive count until I'm able to get it in the right format it needs to be in for publishing/PDF stuff and the like. Stuff is confusing, to say the least.
My last word count for Shy Walking Shadows on Wattpad was 342,525 words.
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