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Notes -
Why aren't novels' word counts common knowledge?
Go on IMDb, look up the pilot episode of an obscure American sitcom which was cancelled after one season, and you will find its duration in minutes (a single, objective measure of how long it will take to consume that piece of media). Go on Wikipedia, look up Blade Runner and it will list the various durations of all the various theatrically released cuts, directors' cuts and so on. Any album noteworthy enough to have its own Wikipedia page will have its duration listed in minutes and seconds, broken down by individual track duration (including the duration of various special/bonus editions). If it isn't notable enough to be on Wikipedia, it will be on Rate Your Music.
Meanwhile, if you want to find out how long it will take you to read a book, Wikipedia might tell you the page count, which is next to useless given how many variables contribute to it: font, font size, page size, margin width and height, formatting decisions (a novel which uses numerous paragraph breaks will take up more pages than a novel of the same word count which uses them sparingly; putting a page break before the start of a new chapter can easily add ten pages to a novel's length; because of its bizarre formatting, House of Leaves's word count is probably 25-40% shorter than its massive page count would imply). Various editions of the same unabridged novel with the exact same wording can have enormous variation in how many pages they take up (e.g. this edition of Moby-Dick is 768 pages, while this one is 608). Last night I Googled "Finnegan's Wake word count", one of the most widely discussed novels of the twentieth century, and the first result was one of these automated websites which calculates an estimate of the word count based on the page count (under the rule of thumb that 1 page = 250 words).
I'm not asking for anyone to laboriously go through the process of counting each word by hand. Finnegan's Wake can be purchased as an ebook, which means its contents have been digitised. If you want to find out the word count, all you have to do is open the text file/EPUB file/AZW file and check. Presumably somewhere in the region of 99% of all novels composed in this century were composed using a word processor, meaning the word counts were known (or at least trivially knowable) to the author, publisher, typesetter etc. well in advance of publication.
Before you book to see a film in the cinema, you'd want to know how long it is so you can plan your day accordingly, so cinemas always include this information (although not, annoyingly, the duration of ads and trailers prior to the movie - state Congress to the rescue!). No one would accept a vague ambiguous proxy for the duration of a film like "there are 1,300 cuts in this film" or "there are 30 scenes in this film" - how long is a "scene"? By the same token, before you start reading a book, you generally want to have some kind of idea of how long it will take you to read it. The publisher has access to an objective measure of the book's length (its word count) but refuses to make this information public, instead relying on a vague proxy for its length which is prone to error and can prove enormously misleading. Why is this?
The physical media of film made their runtimes readily available, and purchasers had a vested interest in learning that information since they were scheduling showings or programming.
Neither really held for books prior to the word processor. Well, maybe for pay-by-the-word magazine authors.
And publishers of serialised novels.
I was actually thinking of pulp magazines. But yeah, there was definitely some demand for word counts.
I suppose I don’t actually know what the common pricing models were for whole novels in the 1800s and 1900s.
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