Word Counts: A MOME Award Organizer's Best Friend *g*

[foxrafer.livejournal.com]

As the nomination period has just started, I wanted to address the issue of word counts. The categories are divided by pairing and length of fic, so part of the nomination requirement is including how many words are in a story.

I know this can be a tedious task. But while I'm sure many people are able to look at a web page or a series of chapters and make a pretty good guesstimate as to the number of words, believe me when I say that many people cannot. Every year I do random checks and every year I find multiple errors. One wrong count can mean several categories get rearranged. Instead of having both long and novel-length categories, we may now have only a long fiction category; instead of a pairing having its own short fiction category it may now have to be melded into a general category. And that's just the possible impact from one mistake. There's never only one wrong count so imagine at the end of the nomination period before I can contact authors to let them know they're on the ballot I have to categorize and recategorize because several counts are off.

I'm not saying this so people feel sorry for me; I love doing the awards because I feel it keeps the LotR fandom love alive and it puts a bunch of great fics in one place for people to enjoy throughout the year. But while I appreciate that getting a count for ten long stories is time consuming, imagine having to get counts for over a hundred. It's not a pretty sight. :-)

One thing I often suggest (if someone is finding it difficult) is that people contact the author and ask them for the count. On the plus side you may make their day to learn that someone feels their story is worthy of a nomination. Conversely if they'd rather not participate you know in advance and haven't taken any additional time getting a count. And to the writers out there, it would be great if you considered adding the word count to your posts and the total word count from a multi-chapter fic to the final chapter. These are just suggestions; clearly no one is required to contact an author or to add counts to their stories. But I wanted to bring it up in hopes that if even a handful of people do, it may make the nomination period a little easier.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please let me know. You can leave a comment here or send me an e-mail. Thanks for listening and have fun finding those great stories!

Edit: Firefox users may have a really easy option available through the Word Count Plus add-on. Thanks to vamp_ress for the tip!

Comments

[afra_schatz]

Well, for me the easiest way is to copy/paste the fic I want to nominate into a Word document since Word automatically does a word count (or, in the older versions, you can at least ask for it :)).

(That said, I hope it's alright to give you the approx. count for fics - say 4.900 instead of 4.956?)

[foxrafer.livejournal.com]

That's exactly what I do (minus Word since I didn't buy it but I paste into Pages) and sometimes I'll double check with an online tool if something seems odd. But yeah, I know it can take a little time to copy the text but sometimes the highlighting goes super fast.

And absolutely, rounding down is more than fine. I double check anything that falls on the cusp of a category anyway (which happens a lot less often than you'd think *g*).

[piperbelle.livejournal.com]

Someone did contact me for a word count and it did make my day, well, night! :)

I'll go add it to my last chapter like you suggested.

Thanks for all your work!

[foxrafer.livejournal.com]

Thanks for saying this. I know sometimes it can feel awkward to contact writers directly but in this case I'd like to think it's a good thing. :-)

[vamp-ress.livejournal.com]

Personally, I usually post on archives that automatically count up words. But especially on LJ you have to do the count yourself or trust the author to provide you with a number (which happens only rarely).

For anyone interested and using Firefox, I can reccomend the Word Count Plus addon. (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4718/). Since I tag all my fic bookmarks with length, I use it quite extensively - you can also add to a count, e.g. if you want to count multichaptered fics. Very useful addon!

[foxrafer.livejournal.com]

What a great addon! I've never heard of it before but it sounds like it could be a great solution for a lot of people. I'm going to add it to my info here and on the nomination post. Thanks so much for sharing the link!

[vamp-ress.livejournal.com]

Glad I could help!

[silvan-lady.livejournal.com]

I have a word count in my fic index so if I was fortunate enough to be nominated and you needed to check, you can find them all on the link below. Completion dates are also shown so you can check eligibility if you need to.

http://taureliell.livejournal.com/335876.html

[foxrafer.livejournal.com]

Thank you! That will be really useful for everyone who plans on nominating this year and for me when I'm pulling the categories together. I know it's not something people often think of when they're posting but it's always really appreciated when writers have an easy place to find the info.