I read a few posts about adverbs today, along with this word count from Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing
Number of -ly adverbs per 10000 words:
Hemingway: 80
Twain: 81
Melville: 126
Austen: 128
J.K. Rowling: 140
E L James: 155
My count in the first 5k words was 67, so 134 per 10k and that’s before a pass to see what can be worded better, so I feel pretty good about it. There is an argument that adverbs get a bad rap, but I’d rather sound like Hemingway than E L James any day.