Wyrd wrote:I'm not certain how the thread moved from number of words to number of bytes. I want 5,000 words as a near minimum chapter length, regardless of how many kb the file takes up.
I keep track by size of file, and do not care on number of words... some others seem to as well.
Note my prior posts gave sizes both by bytes and words... with the exception of Non AA site based HTML, which cannot easily be averaged.
I gave all that as a interesting real world baseline of what is actually out there, which should be what most find acceptable.
Average English word size means the average word is 5 characters plus 1 space, so take size of any text file and divide by 6 for a very rough approximation of word count (assuming you do not simply have it in a program that does word count). That fails when talking HTML.
Since you state 5000 words as your preference, and the estimated average is not much below that for TXT for individual files, most writeers (at least ones I read) would seem to agree with you.