Julie Broad breaks down a WordsRated study of 3,444 New York Times bestsellers from 2011 to 2021, which found books got about 50 pages shorter over the decade. Fiction skews the data, but the real advice is simpler: make it as long as it needs to be, remember longer books sell better in winter, and consider splitting massive nonfiction into series.
Chapters
Are you trying to figure out if your book is too long or too short? If you're wondering if your book is the optimized size for the market, then this video is for you. Hey there, I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers and author of three soon to be four books. One of the most common questions I get asked when I speak with soon to be authors is my book is X big. Is that okay? Sometimes they have a short little book and other times it's a bit of an almanac. The truth is there isn't a right answer when it comes to book length. Your book ultimately needs to be as long as it needs to be to deliver the outcome of the outcome for the reader. Anything less and you're going to have unhappy readers. Anything more and you will struggle to get people to finish reading the book, write reviews and refer other people to read your book. All that said, there was a study that came out in June of 2022 that that indicates the trend is leaning towards shorter books. The study is from Words Rated and I'll link to it in the description below. They analyzed 3,444 titles that were ranked top three on the New York Times weekly bestseller list from 2011 to 2021 and looked at the page count. Now, we normally speak only about nonfiction here, but this study did cover fiction and nonfiction. What they found is what we've been saying for a while. Bestsellers are getting shorter. Over the last decade there was about a 50 page decrease overall in book size that was on the bestseller list. Books over 400 pages are not hitting the bestseller lists as much anymore. I have to tell you, this whole study is impacted greatly by fiction because there are not that many nonfiction books that are more than 400 pages. Tim Ferriss had a few monsters, but in general, a top selling nonfiction business book is usually under 300 pages. But before you haul off and say, okay, that's it, I'm going to write a book that's 100 pages long so it can be read in one sitting. Well, there was data that showed long books stayed longer on the bestseller lists than the shorter books, although that started to dwindle in 2016. In 2016, short books started to win, but again, their definition of short books was under 400 pages, which is comical to me because my definition of a short book is 150 pages or less and a long book is is more than 300 pages. So the data gives you some information to work with. But you do need to consider your reader at the End of the day, I'll show you some charts in a second, but I just want to emphasize that it really, really is about making your book as long as it needs to be to get your point across. Now, all that said, if you are releasing a longer book, the data suggests it's more likely to do well in the winter when people are stuck inside and spending more time reading or doing other indoor activities. Check this chart out. This chart clearly shows the dip in book size that is at the top of the charts in the summer. That's pretty interesting data. Here's a look at the charts if you like to see the data in action. Over 50% of the bestsellers were over 400 pages in four of the first five years between 2011 and 2015, and only one bestseller was over 400 pages in the last five years. In 2021, only 38% of best selling books were more than 400 pages long, which is almost a 30% decrease from 2011. So ultimately, you can use this data how you want. My job years ago was in a real estate data company and my boss always said you can use data like a drunkard uses a lamppost more for support than illumination. In other words, you can use this data to consider another approach to your book or to support your current opinion. Maybe if your book is turning into a monster of a book, which which for nonfiction I would argue is anything over 80,000 words, which will be more than 300 pages, you might consider breaking it up into two books. That's what I did with self publish and succeed. When I started writing that book. My intention was to make it the ultimate guide to self publishing, which included marketing that book. But when I was done writing about self publishing, it was already 65,000 words. So I decided to break out the marketing and write a separate book. That was the right move because the book on marketing, which is in the process of going to an editor now, is over 80,000 words and it doesn't even get into some of the tactical specifics. So if I would have kept them together, it would have easily been 130,000 word book, which would have been more than 400 pages. That's a big book for you. Consider your reader and what their life is like. How do you expect they will read the book? I just finished listening to Alex Hormozi's $100 million offers audiobook. He set it up for future volumes and editions at the beginning. So rather than putting everything into one, he's doing a series. The book is an odd print size so it's 160 pages, but the fonts are also larger. So I'm going to guess his book is 45,000 to 50,000 words. But he knows his audience. He delivered a book that his audience will be able to digest and use, and the 6,000 plus reviews on Amazon tell you he did it right too. He does a brilliant job of breaking the book into bite sized action pieces and also telling you to listen and read at the same time to maximize absorption. He knows his audience, business owners and created a book that they can listen to and or read and at the end of that book they have a very specific outcome of an outcome. So do the same for your readers. If you focus on delivering an outcome of an outcome for a very specific reader and you think about how they're going to want to consume this, then you have the answer to how big your book should be. So go ahead, post it in the comments below. And when you comment the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win some of our sweet outfit. Hashtag noboringbook Swag. Now if you want to go more into the book size and see some examples of what different size books look like, this video right here gives you some physical examples of book size. Maybe you're thinking about chapters. Well, this video right here is all about chapter size and chapter considerations. Both videos are fabulous if I say so myself. And really, I would enjoy hanging out with you a little more. So click on over.
