People often wonder, how can I save money on my publication?  and why does that publication look great, while mine looks cheap and unprofessional?

One factor that can have a big impact both on production time (and thus price) and overall impact of a publication is word count. (In MS Word, you can do a word count by highlighting the text you want to count, and selecting “Word count” under the “Tools” menu.)

The 9×12″ tri-fold brochure example below shows word counts of various blocks of text. 

If you start with content written to an appropriate length, your publication won’t end up looking overcrowded and your designer won’t need to struggle to make the content fit.
(No matter how talented the designer, if there are too many words and not enough space devoted to white space and images, the publication will look low-end.)

The more your designer struggles, the more time you spend going back and forth with proofs, and the more expensive your project gets. Thus, starting with an appropriate word count is a great way to save money and end up with a good result.

To help you visualize how many words to provide for a publication, here are a couple of rough examples. They are not provided as suggested word counts, just examples to help you visualize how many words take up a given amount of space.

I hope this resource will save you lots of time and money on your next project!

In the 8.5×11″ newsletter example above, the word count is indicated in the space that would be left for photos and white space. Note that this is a tight layout with small text and few frills, so estimate on the short end of the word count to provide more layout flexibility.