on word counts

Publishers always have us work in terms of number of words. But at least early in your career, you’ll be more used to thinking in terms of number of pages.

Someone just wrote to me asking how many words would be about how many pages in a book. Well, that depends a lot on layout; some publishers cram more words and sentences onto the page than others.

But what I was able to send him is a complete list of the word counts for all of my own books, in case that allows people to make a rough estimate.

Tool-Being: 155,000 words
Guerrilla Metaphysics: 128,000 words
Prince of Networks: 104,000 words
Quentin Meillassoux: 97,000 words
Towards Speculative Realism: 72,000 words
Heidegger Explained: 60,000 words
L’Objet quadruple: 52,000 words
The Prince and the Wolf: 45,000 words
The Quadruple Object: 44,000 words
Circus Philosophicus: 25,000 words

Notice the interesting difference between the English and French editions of The Quadruple Object, even though the content is exactly the same.