Does Book Size Really Matter?

00:20 - Lynn (Host)

Hi, friends and future authors, this is Lynn “Elikqitie” Smargis, coming to you with another episode of the Publishing for Professionals podcast. I am the owner and ghostwriter and book editor at Write For you Ghostwriting, excited to bring you another episode of another topic I always get from my clients. It's one of the first three questions they always ask me, and it is how big should my book be? So today we are going to dive into the aspects of does book size really matter? So before we get into today's topic, though, I do want to let you know that there is an upcoming virtual book retreat. I'm really excited to offer this. It's coming up this September, so make sure you either click on the link in the description below or visit my website, wwwwriteforyoume, to find out more about the virtual book retreat. You can click on it under events, and it is a complimentary book retreat that I'm offering my listeners from Publishing for Professionals. So we're going to dive into that a little bit more, but before we jump into the episode completely, I was going to read a quick client review. This is from Steve. Steve says “Lynn has been completing contract work for me for over a year. She consistently delivers very great show notes early or, on time, she can lift up an entire room of people with her infectious positivity. It's been great working with her.” Steve, thank you so much for that wonderful review of working together. I really enjoyed working with you as well. We did a lot of content together, a lot of good certain content together, and I really enjoyed working with Steve and his podcast production company. All right, my friend.

02:00

So let's jump into today's topic. Does book size really matter? And the answer is yes and no. Like almost everything else, it really depends on what you're writing and what you want to do with it. So, for example, let's just jump into some common things, right?

02:18

So first, many authors can get paralyzed by length, like how long should it be? Or you might compromise your message right To hit arbitrary word counts. But what matters more than length is your strategic approach to your book size, and there are some common mistakes you definitely want to avoid. There's no universal standard for book length. However, some of the most impactful books are short, right? So bigger does not mean necessarily better. The minimum book length you can upload on Amazon is 2,500 words. So if your book is under 2,500 words, then you cannot publish it on Amazon. It's not considered a book and, honestly, 2,500 words is really like a very long article. I don't believe I would ever publish a book that short, just because I feel like from a professional standpoint it's not really a, it's like a mini ebook. So anyway, I personally would not publish something that small. I would probably not publish anything on Amazon under 10,000 words. That is my, just my professional standard, but that's not a hard and fast rule that anybody needs to follow. I just wanted to throw that in there as far as professional advice goes.

03:26

Okay, so let's talk about the word count myth. So there are so many myths about word counts for quote unquote, real books, right? So there's some literary examples of Great Gatsby, 47,000 words about mice and men was about 30,000 words. Business books the One Thing by Gary Keller is a little bit of a longer book. It's 65,000 words. Business books the One Thing by Gary Keller is a little bit of a longer book. It's 65,000 words. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is over 80,000 words and Good to Great is about 100,000 words. So it doesn't matter I mean it doesn't matter how long your book is. I would say, if you are a first time author, though, it's a good idea to keep it shorter, because, unless you have a really big following and you have people who are just jumping at the bit to read your book, if you are a brand new author, it's probably a good idea to go with a smaller book.

04:12

Now I will say the average size nonfiction book this is not, we're just talking nonfiction today is about 40,000 words or 200 pages. And another question I often get is how many pages is 40,000 words or 200 pages? And another question I often get is how many pages is 40,000 words? Well, that depends on several different factors. One is how many like. What do you have in your front and your back content as far as, like your acknowledgements and your, you have to have a copyright page and a table of content. But are you going to have a dedication page? Are you going to have all these different optional pages, like a work with me page that I always recommend for my clients? So that also plays into how many pages is going to be, how big the font is. So you might be using a 10 point font, a 12 point font, a 14 point font or a font for large print books. So that also plays into the number of pages your book is going to be.

05:03

The other thing that plays into how many pages your book is going to be is how physically big your book is. So is your book going to be like a standard five by eight or five by seven ish, or is your book going to be eight by 10, which makes it bigger size wise, and so it's going to give it less pages because your book is physically bigger, so you can fit more words on a page. And then also depending on the font, right? So if you have 40,000 words but you've got an 8 by 10 book with a 10 font, that's probably going to maybe hit 100 pages, depending on if you have pictures or not. Um, you know, and so you get the idea. So it really depends on your font size, how big your physical book is, your layout that you choose and, um, how many words you have. That all plays into and your pictures, how many pictures you're going to have, how many pages your book is going to be. All right, so you want to.

05:56

One of the keys is you want your book to be as long as it needs to be to deliver the message effectively, without lots of fluff or arbitrary words, because people don't like fluff and arbitrary words. People will stop reading your work if they feel like you're just filling it with fluff, right? So like back in high school and college, where we had, like, you have to have an X amount of words and we used to fill it with fluff, right, don't do that professionally. I wish they would drop word counts in writing, because that's such a bad habit to get into and all my clients are so geared towards. How many words does this need to be right? So it needs to be enough that you've covered all of your points that you want to cover and that you have covered them effectively without adding a lot of fluff in there.

06:38

Now you can add some reflection questions at the end of the chapter. You can add some like playbook questions at the end or at the end of your book. So there's lots of different ways you can play this out, but we're just going to talk about just basic writing, nonfiction book, okay. And so let's talk about book components, right, because the book components, or the pieces of your book, are going to be more important than your book length or your word count. So value density, right. What is the maximum impact per page for busy professional readers?

07:08

have one chapter that's like: 2000

08:04

What about the completeness of your message? Make sure your readers feel satisfied and equipped to do whatever it is you're telling them on the back of the book. This book is going to do so. On the back cover, right, when you flip over books, you often see like a little synopsis of what you're going to learn when you read the book. If it's a nonfiction book, right. Or if it's a fiction book, about the story, and that's how you can tell hmm, do I think I'm going to like this book or not? Right, we all do this, we all. If you ever go to Costco, it's a perfect example. You just go to Costco and look at their book section and just keep flipping over books and see what people are doing with their books at Costco, right? So look at that and see, are you adding value? Have you checked off all the things on the back of your cover that you said you were going to cut? You were going to go over when you were talking about your book on the back cover, right? Is that information inside your pages? Your reader experience? You want to maintain engagement without adding filler, okay. So making sure you're writing succinctly, writing so people understand.

09:05

Don't use a lot of technical jargon unless that is the audience you're going for, because using big words doesn't make you sound smart. It just confuses your reader if you don't need to right, obviously, if it's some type of technical book, then you're going to be using technical jargon because you're this is Hemingway, my writing assistant and, clearly, my podcast sort of guest today if you're watching this on YouTube. So, anyway, your reader is not going to want to read a bunch of technical jargon unless that is the specific focus. All right. So professional positioning, alignment, how your book length supports your brand.

09:39

So if you want to do, you want to be seen as a simple solutions expert, obviously you want to make a shorter book. Maybe 10,000 words is going to be your simple solution, right? That's about a quarter of the size of a quote, unquote, regular, standard size book, which is about 40,000 words. Okay, and obviously your book does not have to be 40,000 words. You can make a simple solutions 10,000 word book, which is perfectly fine, and publish that on Amazon and it's going to be a.

10:06

If you're you are doing that, I would highly recommend making it a very specific solution, right, like you don't want to make it general. If we go back to the example about YouTube, you don't just want to be like how to post on YouTube and do a 10,000 word book, right, that's? That's a lot of information to cover in 10,000 words and that's not going to be accurate. But if you want to do a book on how artists can use YouTube to you know, blow up their brand, that could be a 10,000 word book because it's very specifically towards artists. You can even narrow that down even farther and make watercolor artists right, or painters or whatever types of artists that you are targeting All right, so that would work for a concise book, for a simple solution. Then there are comprehensive books for complete authority positioning. That is going to be a larger word count, because we don't want a small word count on a positioning authority book because there's gonna be just too much to cover. Right, we don't.

11:00

Well, you wanna make sure that when you're writing your content, it is accurately and completely going over all of the things that that person should learn. So when they read the Amazon description, that's going to be what they learn about. And if you have a complete, comprehensive guide, you definitely want that to be more of like an average size to a longer book, maybe 40,000 words or more. All right, market expectations. You need to understand your audience's preferences. So what does your audience like to read? Do they like to read shorter books? Do they like to consume, like one book on an airplane ride. So figure out what your audience likes. If they like more meaty books, more content, then definitely gear your content towards your book, towards that type of reader. All right, so you can. You wanna make sure you have a reader first approach. So serving your audience, okay, is your main focus of any book that you write, no matter what genre you are in.

11:53

Serving your audience Like what does your audience want to hear? What is your audience want to read? What is going to tickle their fancy? What are they going to love from you? That is your main focus. So make sure that you have that in mind, not the goal being a word count, but what is your primary audience target going to want to hear?

12:13

All right, my friends, we're going to take a quick break right here. When we come back, we're going to talk more about book and word count. All right, we're back with the second half of today's episode. I'm really excited to bring this because this question gets asked by literally every one of my clients. There's very few questions that get asked by every one of my clients, but this is typically for some reason. The third question my clients like to ask me is how big should my book be? Right? So today we're talking about does book size really matter? So the first half we've covered some points we're going to be covering in the second half strategic approach to determining your book length.

13:07

Okay. So first you want to start with your core message, right? Your one-sentence clarity test what is your core message? It doesn't have to be of your brand, but of your book, okay. So what is your core message of your book and what is the reader journey going to be? Right? So what is their time constraints? What your reader's detail needs, what are their implication implementation requirements? What are they going to need to know from your book to implement the action steps? If that is what your book is about? Right? And a lot of nonfiction books books are a lot of non-fiction books are self-help that's a very popular genre or memoirs. So if it's a memoir, obviously you don't need action steps. But if it is a non-fiction book that you need action steps for, make sure that they are clear and make sure that you they understand what they need to do in that action step.

13:53

Structuring testing exercise one sentence chapter value statements All right. So can you sum up your chapter value in one or two sentences. Okay, what value does this bring my reader? What is my reader going to learn when they read this chapter? If you can't answer that in one or two sentences, you probably don't have a good focus for that chapter. And this is just for one chapter, right? It doesn't have to be for the whole book. So you want to do that chapter by chapter to ensure that you're bringing really good reading value to your readers and your avatar. All right, quality over quantity. Like we said, 150 pages of transformative value in content is way better than 300 pages with half of it being filler.

14:38

So here's some examples and estimates you can use, and of course, these are not set in stone, right, but these are kind of typical for the industry. So thought leadership books are typically between 120, 150, or 200 pages. How-to or methodology books are typically a little bit longer because you're explaining step by step, so they're gonna be typically about 180 to 250 pages. Now again, your book can be longer or shorter. A comprehensive guide so this would be like a very overall, like very detailed, comprehensive guide to doing something would be somewhere in the realm of 200 and quarter to 250 to 350 pages, and a professional memoir typically runs between 250 and 300 pages. Of course, these are guidelines and not rules, and you can even do something like a 90 page book right to launch your consulting career, or a 400 page industry book that that goes into all of the details of your industry and how to get into it.

15:42

So it just really depends on who you're serving, what you want to tell them. So if you're writing a book for college students that are fresh out of college to graduate, it might be less detailed because they maybe don't need to know as many things about certain aspects of the industry because they're just getting into it. Whether, as if, you're writing a book for somebody who is changing careers midlife, that might need to be a little more detailed because they might need to know some more nuanced information. So just really consider your avatar to know what you're writing and how much of it you want to write and how targeted and focused you want to write and how targeted and focused it needs to be. So let's go over some common mistakes to avoid, because these I see a lot. My clients often ask me a lot of these questions and I put a few others in that I've seen online as well.

16:28

So some common mistakes you'll want to avoid is mistake number one padding tip word counts with repetitive examples and unnecessary content. That drives me crazy. When I read that in a book and when I'm editing when I do book editing for clients I will tell them hey, you copied this information and put it here and I have done that myself writing. Because sometimes when you're writing you forget you write about something in the last chapter or sometimes even earlier in the chapter. That's happened before with clients and myself. So that's why I always have a different editor other than me check my personal work when I am publishing my work online, so that way they always see hey, lynn, you've said this twice, so I can go back and take out whatever paragraph I want to take out. So make sure that you're not repeating things over and over again. Now, if you want, you want to repeat and say remember, we said, talked about this in chapter three and did a one-liner. That's fine, but you don't want to re-explain the whole entire situation again.

17:23

Mistake number two cutting essential content to stay artificially short. This is a really bad idea because you're going to leave your reader hanging and they're not going to understand what they're going to need to do right, because you're not giving them enough detail. So please make sure you avoid the common mistake number two, which is cutting essential content to stay artificially short. Another mistake number three ignoring professional context and positioning goals right. So if you are writing a book and a professional book for other professionals, make sure you understand what context it is that you're writing it right. Are you writing a book for people who want to get ahead in their career? Are you writing a book for people who are looking to switch careers? Right, that's going to be two totally different books. So make sure you're writing in the correct context.

18:08

Mistake number four comparing to inappropriate book types. In other words, like you're looking at a memoir and you're actually writing a self-help book and you're like, wow, my book should probably be longer because this other nonfiction book is longer. If you're writing a nonfiction book, you have to do other nonfiction books that are in your subcategory, such as memoir or self-help or wellness or whatever. It is right. Look at other books that are selling well on Amazon in your category and if you look down and scroll down, you can see they have page counts, illustrations and everything. So look at the ones that are selling well in your category on Amazon and do some research to figure out which is selling well and what is not selling well.

18:47

All right, so for getting reader experience in favor of word count metrics that's what we talked about before. All right, each mistake that you make diminishes your credibility and effectiveness, especially if you have multiple of these mistakes in your book. Right, like you definitely don't want to. You know, have the wrong context and then ignore professional positioning goals, like that's really bad. Or comparing it to an inappropriate book and then padding to hit word counts right, because if you're combining these mistakes, that's going to just make you look more and more unprofessional, and a good editor should be able to flesh these out for you. Okay, I'm specifically saying a good editor, because I recently worked on someone's book, editing it, and they didn't think they needed a line or organizational editor because they had brought their book to one already. However, when I went to edit it, I found out that their first editor was definitely not on par, because I was making corrections their first editor should have made. So make sure that you are aware of that as well.

19:45

All right, the balance, giving readers what they want, but not more or less. I mean, if you want to put a little bit more in there, that's better. I'm going to say, if you're going to err on the more or less side, give them a little bit more. Right, because giving them a little bit less is not going to be a value add. Giving them a little bit more is fine.

20:02

Maybe one of the things I often encourage my clients to do is, if you are publishing a book on Amazon or anywhere, to put in one of your front pages a work with me page with a QR code. I like using link tree because I can change out the codes really easily. I don't have to worry about if I change out my code it's going to be messed up or they're not going to be able to scan the code and get to my link. So, with a little work with me, like, hey, work with me, blah, blah, blah. That way, even if someone doesn't buy your book, they can scan your page and get that information. All right, so so let's wrap up today's episode.

20:36

I hope you found this really helpful. This is one of the common questions I get a lot. So book size matters, right. So does book size matter? Yes, but not in the way most authors think your book should be as long as it needs to be to accurately deliver your message and bring value to your professionals that are reading your book. So your three action steps you can do to define if your book has a good word count is one define your core message in one sentence. You can do that one or two sentences for your whole book and you can also do that for each individual chapter.

21:08

Identify your ideal reader's needs and constraints, like how much time do they have to read If your reader's a busy mom. Ideal readers needs and constraints, like how much time do they have to read If your reader's a busy mom. Don't make it a 400 page book. I once saw a book that was for caregivers for the elderly or caregivers for people who are have disabilities, and it was like 670 pages. No caregiver is going to have time to read a 670 page book, all right. So keep that in mind. Focus on value density.

21:32

Okay, every page has to deliver value, right, it doesn't have to deliver insane value on every page, but the reader should be like, wow, this is great information. I can't wait to get to the next page, all right. So remember, readers buy transformation, not the number of pages. They wanna know if your book is good to solve their problem by reading the back. And reading the back, they're like, yeah, this is exactly what I need to solve. Then you've hit the nail on the head, all right. So make sure you share this episode with other professionals working on their book who are going to have questions about their word count, because every one of my clients do. I don't know why. It's their third question, but it is All right, my friends. So I hope this has been a really good episode for you. Remember to scroll down underneath if you're on YouTube or you're on one of the audio platforms listening to this podcast.

22:24

In the show notes there's going to be an invite for you, because I would love for you to join me for my first virtual writing book retreat, and it's going to be in September. Okay, it's a complimentary book retreat you can attend from the comfort of your home, which means you can come to my book retreat in your pajamas, if you want to Just make sure that they are Zoom appropriate, All right, meet other professionals that are also writing their book at the book retreat. It's going to be held on Zoom. We're gonna be networking. You're gonna get a writing and publishing group coaching. So I'm gonna be doing a group coaching session. So bring your book, your book idea. If you haven't started, that's fine. If you are listening to this podcast and it's July, start writing your book, at least outline it, and then you can bring that to the book retreat.

23:12

I was thinking about pricing for this and I decided, you know, I'm going to just make this first one free because I want it to be open to anyone who is interested in writing a book and anybody who, and we're going to be focusing on nonfiction. So if you're writing fiction, you can come, but just know that this will be focused on nonfiction. And this writing retreat is geared towards professionals who are writing a book, not people who write books for a living. So if you're a professional that's writing a book and you want to have some time, some dedicated time, to just sit down and write your book virtually over Zoom, with other people who are professionals writing their book and myself a professional ghostwriter, so I will be hosting it. Love for you to come.

23:53

Make sure you hop over to my website, wwwwriteforyoume and join the virtual book retreat by filling out my contact form or you can go under the events tab. And under the events tab there is going to be a link to the virtual writing retreat. So make sure you fill that out, so we have all your information and you get the links for the virtual writing retreat in. So make sure you fill that out, so we have all your information and you get the links for the virtual writing retreat in September. All right, my friends, remember that every best-selling author started exactly where you are now, but they didn't do it alone. So come to this virtual writing retreat and get the support you need, network and meet other professionals who are doing the same thing. Until next week, this is Lynn “Elikqitie”, reminding you to keep writing, keep dreaming and keep creating. Your book is ready to be born.