Find the Word Count for Published Books
You’ve written a book, and after typing it in Microsoft Word, you have accumulated a grand total of 95,000 words. Now the question is: how do you find published titles with word counts comparable to your book within its genre?
I won’t call this technique a hack, but it is using a tool that was meant for a different purpose to get your answer. Check out AR Book Finder.
For those of you who have been out of the public school scene for a while, the idea of the Accelerated Reader (AR) program by Renaissance Learning is likely unfamiliar. Basically, Renaissance Learning processes the text from each book using a top secret formula, then assigns a point value to the book. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst is valued at .5 points; Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand is 102 points. Pretty much everything else falls between (except War and Peace, but then, it is Tolstoy). School-aged children read books, then take multiple choice tests over the books to accumulate points. The idea is the encourage independent reading by providing a virtually unlimited selection of book choices (the company claims more than 150,000 quizzes are available).
The first time you visit www.arbookfind.com, the site will ask whether you are a student, parent, teacher, or librarian. Your choice doesn’t matter other than to Renaissance Learning as they calculate what specific population is utilizing the site.
The main landing page is the basic search page. For more advanced options select the Advanced Search tab (more on the Advanced Search in a bit).
Go ahead and pick your favorite childhood book to search so you can see an example of a book record. The search results will be based on relevance and will have limited meta-data displayed. For most of the company’s primary users (K-12 students and their teachers), the search results contain as much information as they will ever need. Kids care about the points and to a lesser extent, the book level and the quiz number. Everything else is hieroglyphics to them, or the printed equivalent of the speech of every adult from the Charlie Brown cartoon universe (“Waah Waah Waah Waah Waah…”).
For our purposes, it’s the main book record that actually has the word count, so click on your top result to see the full details. The data that was previewed in the basic search results is expanded to include the following:
Word Count. The number sits in the middle of the meta-data immediately beneath rating.
ATOS Book Level. This is the reading level of the book; the first number represents the grade level, and the second number represents the month. Thus Atlas Shrugged should be readable for an eighth grade student in his or her second month of school.
At the bottom of the record is a list of published editions of the title including publisher, ISBN, year published, and page count. The list is not necessarily an exhaustive list, so don’t get too freaked out when your specific edition of The Neverending Story by Michael Ende isn’t displayed.
Advanced Search Tip: Search by ISBN
The Advanced Search page has a box to input a valid ISBN. As long as the book has been connected to the quiz, the result will pop up. This can be very handy if you happen to have a barcode scanner, as you can simply scan the book ISBN barcode to return a result. It’s also handy if you don’t have a barcode scanner because you can type the number from the back of the book or from the title page of the book to search for a specific item.
If the book is not in the database by ISBN, don’t give up hope (see note above about The Neverending Story), especially for a title that has been issued by many companies or in many editions. Unlike other sites that attempt to collect every book ever printed, AR’s only goal is to connect kids with quizzes. Those quizzes are built around book titles, not book editions. Thus there may have been more than twenty translations of Tolstoy but only one has actually been linked to a quiz (and oddly enough, the translator is NOT mentioned in the book record). This can create a challenge when trying to find some titles that have been adapted or abridged. Take Les Miserables, for example. Hugo’s behemoth weighs in at a hearty 105 points in its full, unabridged edition. But there’s also a 12,350 word adaptation that is worth only 2 points.
For those of you wondering about the book ratings/stars… After any reader finishes taking the test, he or she is asked to rate the book with the reminder that the rating will have no affect on the quiz score. Presumably those ratings contribute to the stars displayed with each book record.
If you are attempting to calculate your own book or reading level, you can see a previous post of mine that profiles Supermagnus software’s Word Counter program.
Does this help you? Or do you have a useful tip to share? I’d love to hear your comments.
