I’ve sent Down with the Queen to my team of Alpha Readers to have a look at the first draft. Excluding the front matter, story so far, author’s note, and similar material, it’s a bit shy of 101,000 words. This time I’m remembering that a lot of people don’t know how long that is in pages of a book, so let me try to translate. An average page of a book is 250-300 words per page, so assuming 300 the manuscript would be in the neighborhood of 335 pages long.

I should add that a book’s length varies so much based on different settings that giving a page count as an author is almost useless, on the whole. It’s why I usually give a word count, because that same text is 160 pages in Word for me (11 point Garamond font), but another author might have 24 point font which would change everything. For me this was something of a shock, because I used to judge books on the page count myself. The more you learn, right?

Now, this past week I got back the art for the cover of Down with the Queen from June Jenssen. I’ve been working on a cover for a few days, trying some different things (including other fonts), but in the end I find I like the style I’ve gone with before, though I’m trying to remove borders. Here’s the one that will most likely be the final cover below.

Finally, as for the release date for Down with the Queen. I haven’t set it for certain yet, and will announce the pre-order once I do, but at the moment I’m expecting March 29th or 30th, unless something goes dramatically wrong.

That’s it for today, though!