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This is a huge reason I preferred to self-publish. I have a math book that is 12-chapters (~90 pages total), written in a compact, friendly style I prefer. Ther
by kalid 10y ago
This is a huge reason I preferred to self-publish. I have a math book that is 12-chapters (~90 pages total), written in a compact, friendly style I prefer. There are too many incentives to pad out your writing when you are trying to fill physical shelf space ("look impressive" vs "be useful"). Instead of a page count, how about an idea count?
(I get the occasional feedback that people wish that the book was longer, they want more topics, but never any individual chapter being longer...)
- dogdogdogdog 10y agoWhat book? I'm on the lookout for a good math book.
- jacquesm 10y agoKalid has a whole pile of good stuff at: https://betterexplained.com/ https://betterexplained.com/
- kalid 10y agoThanks Jacques :)
- kalid 10y agoMath, Better Explained https://www.amazon.com/Math-Better-Explained-Unlock-Intuition-ebook/dp/B006J5L3VU https://www.amazon.com/Math-Better-Explained-Unlock-Intuitio... Check out a few articles on https://betterexplained.com/cheatsheet https://betterexplained.com/cheatsheet and see if they fit your style.
- scrollaway 10y agoOh Kalid it's you! I haven't bought your book (and I'll remediate to that right now), but I've followed all your posts, they're fantastic. Go buy this guy's book :)
- kalid 10y agoThanks Jerome =).
- dogdogdogdog 10y agoThanks!
- eru 10y agoJust to throw in a plug: 'The Pleasures of Counting' is one of the best math books you can get your hands on.
- SiVal 10y agoIt's harder to tell how long an ebook is than a paper book and harder to know where you are in it from the feeling of how many pages are gripped in each hand. This is a downside of ebooks for me--harder to get an automatic sense of the geography of the book, where I am in it, where interesting things I read were located, where to flip to in order to check something. But I think there's a silver lining to the length being so hard to see. I suspect it will lead to more authors tailoring their book length to how best to express the content rather than to the market expectations of the physical size of a "book".
- kalid 10y agoYep, exactly. I prefer print for books I intend to refer to often. (I use createspace to turn the ebook to print on demand. With Softcover & LaTeX, you can get print-quality PDFs, best of both worlds.) Focusing on the ebook version first helps you keep the content to the right (best-fitting) length.