Re: One more quick question....
Oh, I add this as to why word counts are meaningless unless they're characters+spaces/6.
This sentence is created using different words of differing lengths. If you count the words themselves, you get one number: if you counted up the actual characters (including spaces), you'll get an entirely different number. See where I'm going? Word count, as defined by "a bunch of characters surrounded by spaces" could be the words "a thin ox" (three words) or "a delicious coherency" (also three words).
And before anyone thinks of this ... By and large, trying to say "the short words will cancel out the long words in a manuscript" is a fallacy; it doesn't work that way (oh, I'm sure someone could do it, by working very hard and counting each character, trying to literally balance all the characters to be even -- but the book would probably suck).
This is why publishing production depts. decided long ago that "a word" would be six characters, period. That way you can tell me you have a 120,000-word book, and I'll know
exactly how many typeset pages it will be. More or less (mileage varies depending on paragraph length, too, because of indents in paragraphs, but I diverge from our original discussion, and page count estimates to create layout estimates are boring to the non-typesetters among us -- which is just about everyone).
Now, I'll give the huge caveat to all of this:
Until your book is accepted by the publisher
no one cares. Giving them a
ballpark word count is good enough for everyone -- really. I would not lie to you.
After your book is accepted, on the schedule, etc., someone (like me) will ask for a file of the book and do the math. That's why we get paid the big bucks. (And if you believe that last sentence, I have a bridge to sell you.)
But someone asked the question, and another person answered, saying this is how it's usually done in-house. And indeed that answer was right, if all you have is hardcopy to use. If you have a file, another technique is used altogether. At least it is nowadays. I was being overly helpful, probably to the detriment of some poor authors' brains, who only need to know two things:
1. Write as well as you can.
2. Finish the book.
(Note that this second piece of wisdom is extremely important and sounds extraneous, but you wouldn't believe how many people never finish writing and how hard it is to finish an entire book.)
P.S.
Yes, Word 6 does indeed count characters. I use it all the time, as I rather dislike Word 7 and above. I'm on the Mac tonight -- if you remind me by message, I will post a note tomorrow from the PC, giving you explicit directions on how it does so. Because my brain is frozen in pain from my wrist, I cannot for the life of me remember how the screen in the Word Count submenu looks. Embarrassing, but true. But I do assure you it's there -- until I started using the Mac more, I used it on the PC every day for the last almost-decade (like you!).