Writing a book is the easy part

My head is spinning. I've been searching for a publisher. Some of the purple prose on both publisher's and agency's websites is worthy of award in its own right, but this entry on a website that will remain anonymous (unless you really want to Google it, and even then...) had me laughing out loud:

But before you send us your manuscript you MUST understand a few facts:
1. Writing a book is the easy part; selling it to a publisher and then to a market is very much harder.

The easy part eh? Yeah, that'd be right. It's only taken me eight years. If that's the easy part and selling it to a publisher is "very much harder" then I'll be lucky if it gets into print before I croak. *sigh*

Then there's the word count argument. Published work is divided into "short story", "novella", "novel" by the number of words it contains. So how to arrive at that number of words? Here are two conflicting stories that coincidentally appeared on agency sites that I visited consecutively today.

Site A:
Your computer lies - you cannot trust its word counting ability. It can't even read. So, here is the quick and dirty method agents and publishers use. [with standard m/s formatting] your typed page will contain 250 words. If you have a manuscript 300 pages long, then the word count will be 75,000.

Site B:
Word Count: The three best ways for determining word count are simply
1. Use the word count feature in your word processor.
2. Use the same feature to count the number of characters including spaces and divide by six.
3. Or to use the counter to total the number of characters not including spaces. Take this number and divide by five

This is important. If you have used some sort of formula to tell you how long your novel is based on an assumed number of words per page, you're probably way off.

Good grief.