EDIT: Issue resolved! The Tapas staff emailed me back, and @spicy_sweets was correct. I just had to go back and "update" my early chapters that were uploaded before the word counter was installed.The novel's word count is now rightly up to 32.9k.
Leaving original post up in case anyone else has same problem:
Hello all,
So I reached 50,000 words in my novel today (I haven't posted it all to Tapas quite yet because of scheduling) but I'm a little bit nervous that the site might not actually be counting the words accurately. I was wondering if anyone else was having this problem.
According to Microsoft Word, which is where I'm typing the draft, what I've uploaded (up through Chapter 9), is about 29,000 words. My dashboard says that the sum of the chapters is "20.9k" which is almost 9,000 words short. Since I've really been looking forward to finally having some Ink with which to support my favorite creators, it's made me a little nervous.
I've already emailed Tapas about this, but so far, I haven't heard a response, and since we're closing in on the deadline, it has me kinda worried. Has anyone else encountered this problem? Would there be a particular reason for the discrepancy? Things like hyphenated words, italicizing, etc.? Am I overthinking this?
Hope this is the right place to ask!