This question was asked on NaNoWriMo, and here is what I had to say:
The way I see it, the forward, the prelude, the afterword, the table of contents, the index, the glossary, the title page, about the author page, the dedication page, and the copyright page are all part of the book... I mean, how often do you seea book without at least 2 or 3 of those? If you plan to use them in the published edition of your book, than they are most certainly a part of your book and you are going to have to write them at some point, so you might as well write them now. If they are all part of the book, than they are not cheating and there's nothing stopping you from useing every one of them either.
I would say that it could count if it directly told about how you came up with the story, however, I would also say that it would be better if you just focused on writing your story... chances are, you'll get to 50,000 a lot sooner than you think. Besides, the time you spend writing a forward, could have been spent writing another chapter for your book.
If you think your story well be too short, on good trick is to turn it into "three stories". Write your story, than after you finish it, write a prelude to it. Most preludes are very short, however I have seen books where the prelude took on a life of it's own, and told the "story before the story", and was infact a whole other story on it's own which told how the hero got to the point they were at when the main-story started. Likewise, at the end of you story you can add an afterwards, which tells what happened to your characters after the main-story ended. Again, these are usuallly very short, but sometimes they become a whole seperate story. In the end you end up with not one, but three seperate stories about your hero, which you can than sell as a set of short stories or individualy to magazines.
You'd be suprised just how few words 50,000 really is. In fact it's very rare to find a publisher that well publish a book that short. It would be easier for you to find a magazine to publish it as 2 pats in 2 of their issues. Most short stories in magazines are 25,000 words, while short-shorts are anoything under 7,500. Minute-Mini's are under 1,500 words.
50,000 words is actually considered to be a short story or novella by traditional publishing standards, and when a story that short is printed up it is usually a middle school chapter book such as: The BabySitter's Club, GooseBumps, Bunnicula, or Bailey School Kids books.
150,000 is considered standard for "light reading" size books, such as Nancy Drew mysteries, while 300,000 is the average for many of the best selling titles, such as the first few Harry Potter book. Epic length stories are 500,000 to 750,000 such as Lord of the Rings or the later Harry Potter books.
When you look at it in comparision to the size of the actual finished printed book, 50,000 in nothing.
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Copper Cockeral
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