The author's list is a special unit that is common among people related to literature. It is a method of measuring the volume of text accepted in this field, which is used, among other things, for calculating royalties.
Author's sheet volume
Among people who only occasionally face the need to read or write a text, it is accepted to measure its volume in standard units - pages, less often in signs. However, among professional writers, proofreaders, editors and other specialists whose field of occupation is literary works, this method of measurement is rarely used.
There are several reasons for the refusal of the generally accepted units of measurement of the volume of text by such specialists. First, the measurement of text, for example, by pages, is not accurate enough, since this requires specifying additional parameters, for example, line spacing, font size, and others. In addition, professional writers usually deal with texts of a fairly significant volume, so it is more convenient to use larger units to measure them.
As a result, the literary industry has developed its own approach to measuring the volume of texts. The main unit for them was the so-called author's sheet, the size of which was taken equal to 40 thousand characters, which, in addition to letters and numbers, also include punctuation marks and spaces. In standard terms, depending on line spacing, font size and other characteristics of the text, one author's sheet is equivalent to approximately 22-23 A4 pages.
The author's sheet, therefore, is the main way to measure the amount of work done by the author of the text or literary workers whose duties include preparing it for printing, for example, editors or proofreaders. At the same time, immediately before printing, in addition to the number of copyright sheets of text, it is customary to count also the so-called accounting and publishing sheets: they do not differ from the copyright ones in the number of characters, but they include additional information, for example, annotation, content, and others.
Special formats
At the same time, it should be emphasized that in the described understanding, the term "author's sheet" applies only to ordinary texts, that is, written in prose with standard formatting. For special types of works of authorship, separate parameters for accounting for the volume of the author's sheet are applied.
So, if we are talking about a work of poetry, 700 lines of text are considered to be the unit of volume of the author's sheet. If the author's work is presented in the form of illustrations, graphs, tables and similar material that cannot be taken into account by determining the volume of the text, it is customary to take it into account in the number of square centimeters. So, in this case, 3000 square centimeters of such material is recognized as the author's sheet.
