# How many words make a Kindle page according to Amazon?



## 57280 (Feb 20, 2012)

Friends:

What, approximately, is the word count per page on a Kindle book? When I see "250 pages" on an Amazon Kindle sales info for a book, what does a page break down to in terms of words?

Thanks in advance!


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## C. Gold (Jun 12, 2017)

Roughly 300 words per Kindle page.

I had to figure this out when trying to figure out which books to nominate in which categories for the Hugo. I took samples of books that had both word counts listed and the corresponding Kindle page number. Note - I saw a thread on the kdp site that claims this number changes when the ebook is linked to the paperback.


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## C. Gold (Jun 12, 2017)

Denise Templey said:


> It does change. In case it does NOT, reuplaod your ebook. The paperback pagecount should then be linked to the ebook.


Yep, just checked and it even has a little dropdown arrow on the page count that gives a tooltip that says _contains real numbers based on the print edition (ISBN XXX)_

Why did I never notice that before? lol!


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## unkownwriter (Jun 22, 2011)

It's somewhere around 300 to about 350 words for a page by Amazon's reckoning, though we don't actually know for sure. I suspect they actually go by character count, which includes punctuation and the enter key as well as letters and spaces. The 250 word count comes from the old days when people wrote on typewriters, double spaced in TNR or Courier.


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## 57280 (Feb 20, 2012)

Thanks, all. I remember the 250 typewriter days.


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## Hope (Nov 28, 2014)

she-la-ti-da said:


> It's somewhere around 300 to about 350 words for a page by Amazon's reckoning, though we don't actually know for sure. I suspect they actually go by character count, which includes punctuation and the enter key as well as letters and spaces. The 250 word count comes from the old days when people wrote on typewriters, double spaced in TNR or Courier.


I agree with this. I have a series of seven novellas and the second shortest book has the most pages, according to Amazon. I think I might have seen where Amanda said if a book has a lot of dialogue, it will end up with a higher page count.


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## notjohn (Sep 9, 2016)

I used to figure 400 words per page for a print edition, 250 words for a Kindle "page." But since Amazon has been paying a fraction of a penny per page,. the count has clearly gone up. I suspect it's now more like 350 words, and any page that in a traditional print edition would have no or lower-case roman numerals is not counted at all.

If there's a print edition, the Kindle edition usually though not always changes from the Amazon estimate to the actual print count, which in the past has always represented a drop.


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## Lummox JR (Jul 1, 2012)

My first book was given 375 words per page as the estimate, and came out almost exactly where the print edition did. From what I understand, Amazon's WPP rating varies a lot and depends on many factors. It appears to definitely be influenced by the format of the book, including the page size in the original document even though that doesn't mean anything to the Kindle edition. (I expressed some skepticism at that, but another author who had experimented with it assured me it was true.)

What I'm more interested in knowing is how they calculate KENP. I doubt that's based on a strict word count either. For what it's worth as a data point though, my newest release is 118K words and 653 KENP, so it's about 180.7 words per KENP.

Word count per page is really a very outdated metric. You often hear the "fact" bandied about that 250 wpp is the norm, but that's for manuscripts only and it _never_ applied meaningfully to anything else--but because of misinformation, a lot of authors have treated it as gospel and have as a result wildly inflated the page counts they tell their readers about. Most novels tend toward 300-350 wpp but as I mentioned there are outliers.

IMO, if you choose to include word and/or page count in a fact line, the word count is more important. A page count without a word count is useless, because you don't know if the author was basing that on a paperback version or their word processor or the aforementioned misinformation. Word count is the only meaningful indicator of length.


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

I'm showing 338 store front pages on an 81k book, so about 240 words per page.


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## unkownwriter (Jun 22, 2011)

There's an old thread around here someplace where people were experimenting, trying to figure out how Amazon determined KENPC, and it turns out that if you take the number of characters and divide it by 1000 (I'm pretty sure that's it), you end up pretty close to the KENPC given you. I've tried this on several of my books, going by a spreadsheet I have, and it works out pretty close.

Amazon has said they don't count front matter when figuring out KENPC, but do include back matter, which is why we have the padding of extra books to expand the pay out. My feeling is, maybe they should stop counting back matter as well, but they don't listen to me.


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## Guest (Jun 26, 2017)

she-la-ti-da said:


> Amazon has said they don't count front matter when figuring out KENPC, but do include back matter, which is why we have the padding of extra books to expand the pay out. My feeling is, maybe they should stop counting back matter as well, but they don't listen to me.


That's because people don't always read the front matter, when I open a kindle ebook it automatically skips it.


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## Forgettable (Oct 16, 2015)

.


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## skylarker1 (Aug 21, 2016)

C. Gold said:


> Roughly 300 words per Kindle page.


Well, that explains how my children's 'how-to' craft book (32 pages in print and heavy on illustrations) can be listed at ten pages.


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## Lummox JR (Jul 1, 2012)

skylarker1 said:


> Well, that explains how my children's 'how-to' craft book (32 pages in print and heavy on illustrations) can be listed at ten pages.


Except C. Gold is wrong; 300 wpp is incorrect.

It's clear from the evidence that Amazon's page count estimate is not based on word count at all. From others who have experimented, it does seem to change with the page dimensions even though those are not relevant to an ebook. My best guess is that they're running it through some kind of formatter, so that the estimate would vary based on writing style, page breaks, and other factors.


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