Counting on words

Do you write to a specific pre-determined manuscript length? Does your publisher require you to stay within a word-count range?
by Dietrich Kalteis
I don’t outline or plot out my novels, so I don’t really know when I start out where it will end up, or how many words or pages there will be. A novel is generally considered to be north of 50,000 words, and nowadays publishers seem to prefer the length to be in the 70,000 to 100,000 word range. My novels average toward the lower end of that, but th...