Nick Jeffery yesterday posted his best guess of Hallmarked Man’s publication date, 25 July 2025, a hypothesis extrapolated from previous publication dates’ distance from the announcement that Rowling had submitted her final draft.

Inspired by that logic, I wondered if we could guess how many pages Strike 8 will be.

There is simply no way to know, of course, but if one were forced to guess, what clues about Hallmarked Man and information about previous Strike-Ellacott books do we have that could be used a la the date of publication guesstimate to come up with an as-likely-as-not page count?

We have a Rowling tweet about the number of chapters in Hallmarked Man from late September.

She had tweeted while on her birthday cruise in July around Greenland that she was working on (and nearly finished with?) Strike 8, so it might reasonably be assumed that by September she was putting final touches on the novel.

The epigraph to Part Nine is telling, perhaps:

That passage from A Maid of the Silver Sea has a note of finality to it and Running Grave only had nine chapter sets, Rowling’s ‘Parts,’ so we hoped at the time this meant that she was nearing the finish line.

If we shamelessly and carelessly neglect all logical procedure, though, and assume that chapter 119 is an epilogue piece (in which Cormoran Strike finally meets his estranged biological father?) that Rowling found especially “satisfying” in part because it was the end of her first draft labors, then we can hazard a guess about the final page number for Hallmarked Man.

The calculation will require knowing the average number of pages per chapter in the Strike-Ellacott series and then multiplying that number times 119. Here is your data set for that effort:

• Cuckoo’s Calling:  46 chapters, 455 pages (Prologue, Epilogue)
• The Silkworm: 50 chapters, 455 pages
• Career of Evil:  62 chapters, 489 pages
• Lethal White:  71 chapters, 647 pages (Prologue, Epilogue)
• Troubled Blood:  73 chapters,  927 pages
• Ink Black Heart:  107 chapters, 1012 pages
• Running Grave:  137 chapters,  945 pages (Prologue, Epilogue)*

Total Pages/Total Chapters = 4,930/546/4,930 = ~9 = Average pages per chapter in Strike-Ellacott series

The average pages per chapter in the series, then, being 9, multiplied by our closest approximation of the number of Hallmarked Man chapters we have been given, 119, yields 1,071 as a ‘Good Guess of How Many Pages Hallmarked Man will be.’

A quick glance at the earlier books in the series, however, shows that those books averaged well over 9 pages per chapter and more recent books significantly less. Running Grave‘s pages per chapter count, for example is almost 7, a 22% difference with the series average.

If we use the average pages per chapter of the most recent book and multiply it by our best number for Hallmarked Man chapters, we get 7 x 119, or 833 pages, perhaps a ‘Better Guess of How Many Pages Hallmarked Man will be.’

As we have thrown all concern for significant figures and calculation sobriety to the winds, how about using an ‘Average of Averages,’ either using the two page number guesses and dividing them by two or just multiplying 119 times 8, the midpoint between 7 and 9? Both those methods give us ‘952 pages‘ as our potentially ‘Best Guess of How Many Pages Hallmarked Man will be.’

I offer this effort to you — and if you have read this far, you are a Serious Striker indeed — as a ‘for instance’ of how not to be reading Rowling-Galbraith. While I helped pioneer back in the years of Potter Mania the speculative madness about all aspects of what the next Hogwarts book would include (e.g., the temperature and weather on Privet Drive in the opening chapter per alchemical formula), it’s past time we give up on such folly and free labor for Mulholland’s marketing team.

Who cares after all how many pages the next book will be, when it will be published, or the cover picture to be used, all subjects and facts that will soon be forgotten after we have the book and can discuss it? We have entered the Fourth Generation of Rowling Studies, in which we are moving towards a consistently broader view of Rowling’s work than a border line obsessive fixation on her most recent codex and the book-in-queue.

But it was fun to come up with a Best Guess of 952 pages for Hallmarked Man, the folly of which calculation we will all appreciate even more on the day of publication (which I confess to hoping will come on Rowling’s sixtieth birthday, 31 July 2025, rather than Nick’s guesstimate of 25 July). Thanks for sharing your best guesses in the comment boxes about page or date, or, better, for submitting the plot point Golden Threads you hope the HogwartsProfessor team will take up after we’re done with Pregnancy Traps. Cheers!