So I have started reading marketing books for a while. And found out that the most helpful ones were usually under 100 pages long. And there were books that were longer than 300-400 pages but those books had too much unnecessary information to increase the page count.
So I read a few books that were 300 pages long and the firs 100 pages were just about how marketing is important, statistics about that etc. Which is pretty useless. Then after 100 pages the real information starts. And they repeat the same things after the page 200. In general the book could just be written with under 100 pages
I see it as a waste of time usually. What do you think?
by Zealousideal-Bat2897
12 Comments
They get paid by how many words they use
I’ve become extremely picky about reading non-fiction. I know it’s different if you’re reading something for educational purposes, but these days I simply won’t spend my free time reading 400-page books that could have been explained in the 10% of the book’s length. They are overwrought and padded with examples and cases to justify the price tag of a full book.
The question is often unnecessary for whom?
A lot of books are written with the expectation that the reader doesn’t know a lot about the topic and therefore will need a decent amount of background information. You need to give people the background, so that they are up to speed and will know enough to understand what you are trying to explain. If you as the reader knows more then the target audience just skim read those parts until you get to something interesting.
It’s rampant for non-fiction and I have no excuse for them. For fiction, it may serve a deliberate purpose. In C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, which I absolutely love, at one point the main character was stranded in the sea alone for several pages. That was very painful to go through. But by doing that, I can kinda feel how long it was for the character during this event.
An awful lot of popular non-fiction books could be distilled into excellent long magazine articles. The ability to skim is vital in reading most non-fiction!
A lot of nonfiction is scouted based on topic and author, sometimes agents and publishers reach out to a person and be like “hey, I think a book about X could be good and you should write it” which is very different from the way fiction is handled in the industry.
Often writers DO have word counts/page counts they are trying to meet to make it a book, otherwise there’s no reason it can’t just be an article in a newspaper or journal. We don’t tend to think about books needing page counts because it should be up to the authors discretion but there are certain expectations of lengths of books, fiction and nonfiction. A good nonfiction self help book, for example, may say that the sweet spot is between 200 and 300 words, as the point of the book is to let the read absorb what’s needed and apply the help as quickly as possible
Publishers figure nobody’s going to spend $39.95 for a 100 page book. As for fiction, the ubiquitous trilogy curse is even worse. Not every book needs to be part of a trilogy.
It’s not always to increase the page count. A lot of people learn by stories and by hearing the same information repeated in different ways.
I’m guessing you are more like me, I’m what I like to call a bullet points person. I just want the bare details, I don’t need examples or stories for most things, I find it irritating. I also understand that I’m in the minority. I spent a couple of decades as a course creator and I had to learn how to teach in ways that other people can learn, I had to partner with a peer to help me because my 1-hour lectures could really be distilled to a 1-page document with bullet points.
I think there are some categories that need to be longer – historical fiction and some non fiction. I didn’t mind that Shogun was near 100 pages. But it used to be that books like mysteries and thrillers were around 300, 350 pages and now some of them are so bloated. I read a few of the latest Jack Reacher books and one of them was almost 500 pages with a lot of “filler”.
Because it seems more legitimate when its more pages, and I believe there are some requirements for publishing for it to be a “book” as opposed to a novel, or novelette, or what have you.
I find this in fiction too. Repeating the same ideas, feelings in same language every 20 pages.
This is especially true for textbooks.
Have you ever noticed as a child… you open a textbook to read on a specific topic…and half of the chapter is a history of the topic and a biography before it gets to the actual definition of the concepts that you need to know for the test ?
I am beginning to feel that it’s nonsense to increase page count.