Last year was my first year working full-time as a writer. I worked freelance for CT News Junkie and for the New Haven Independent, so I did alot of writing. But how much is “alot”?
Fortunately, I’ve had to maintain a spreadsheet of all the articles I wrote for News Junkie. According to that tally, I wrote 175,508 words in 2024. But to be fair, alot of the “writing” I do involves quoting political figures and other leaders. So let’s cut that number in half- we’ll say I wrote 87,754 original words.
Tracking my writing for NHI is a little bit harder since I didn’t keep a spreadsheet for those articles. Yet I do know how many articles I wrote, and my editor asked for 450-500 words per article. I never wrote less than 500 words, so a little bit of math gives me a decent estimation (although I frequently went well over 500 words, again let’s be conservative and keep it at 500 words per article). I wrote 174 articles for NHI last year, so 174 x 500= 87,000 words.
Add those two numbers together- 87,754 + 87,000- and we get a grand total of 174,754 words.
Word counts to pages isn’t an exact science- the rule of thumb I’ve always used is that there are about 400 words per page in a novel, on average. That would mean I wrote about 437 pages last year. There’s a website though that tries to calculate word count to page conversions with more accuracy. According to Wordcounter.net, I wrote 388.3 single spaced pages using Arial font, size 12.
What kind of company would I be in with a 400 page book? According to Good Reads, some famous examples of 400 page books include:
- Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
- The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin
- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
- Becoming by Michelle Obama
- The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas
- Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Of course, writing 400 pages and writing a 400 page book are completely different things, with the latter being much more difficult than the former. But it feels good to know that I can put that many words down on paper in a year, and gives me an idea of what kind of goals I should have for my personal writing in 2025.
