4 ms·

I would love to see this broken out by fiction/non-fiction. I read mainly fiction and some stories just take longer to tell than others so I don't really take p

I would love to see this broken out by fiction/non-fiction. I read mainly fiction and some stories just take longer to tell than others so I don't really take page count into consideration. When I do read non-fiction I almost always think that the book could be improved by heavily editing down the second half.

mathattack 4y ago
I recall someone saying “Most non-fiction books really just have a 15 minute message.” At least with fiction there can be some beauty in the extension.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I think that's true of most popular nonfiction. It gets less true fast as you move into more-serious writing and genres. But, to be fair, that crappy airport-nonfiction self-help/lazy-(auto)biography/pop-business/pop-hustle-science almalgam-genre may well be most of the non-fiction that people actually read. [EDIT] Well, that and True Crime, if we're counting that.
  - mathattack 4y ago
    To me one definition of Great is that I get additional value in a second reading. In fiction Tolkien is the prime example. There are very few non-fiction authors this holds for. When I find them it’s a dangerous path as I want to read everything they ever wrote.
ghaff 4y ago
A lot of non-fiction books are IMO longer than they need to be, especially "business" books and things in that vein. Really fleshing out an idea takes more than a magazine article but a lot of the time it also doesn't really need a 250+ page book--but that's about the minimum that publishers will generally take on. One might have hoped that ebooks would have changed that but a lot of readers presumably would feel shortchanged paying regular book price for a 75-100 page book. But, as a publisher, my costs are pretty similar whether the book is 100 pages or 300 pages.
- chrisbaker98 4y ago
  According to some Sam Harris podcast I vaguely remember listening to years ago, publishers generally don't want to publish short (like <200 page) books because they don't make enough money. Longer books are more profitable because the perceived value is higher so consumers are willing to pay higher prices for them, even though they don't cost much more to print. Which is one reason why 90% of "business" books are forgettable wastes of paper that contain one or two ideas stretched out over 250 pages and serve little purpose except to advertise the author's consulting company.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I do think some historical background, case study examples, etc. can flesh out one or two basic concepts and help to give them more credibility and stickiness. But, yeah, even something like Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm probably could have been comfortably covered in 100 pages with room to spare.

mathattack 4y ago

I recall someone saying “Most non-fiction books really just have a 15 minute message.” At least with fiction there can be some beauty in the extension.

yamtaddle 4y ago
I think that's true of most popular nonfiction. It gets less true fast as you move into more-serious writing and genres. But, to be fair, that crappy airport-nonfiction self-help/lazy-(auto)biography/pop-business/pop-hustle-science almalgam-genre may well be most of the non-fiction that people actually read. [EDIT] Well, that and True Crime, if we're counting that.
- mathattack 4y ago
  To me one definition of Great is that I get additional value in a second reading. In fiction Tolkien is the prime example. There are very few non-fiction authors this holds for. When I find them it’s a dangerous path as I want to read everything they ever wrote.

ghaff 4y ago

A lot of non-fiction books are IMO longer than they need to be, especially "business" books and things in that vein. Really fleshing out an idea takes more than a magazine article but a lot of the time it also doesn't really need a 250+ page book--but that's about the minimum that publishers will generally take on. One might have hoped that ebooks would have changed that but a lot of readers presumably would feel shortchanged paying regular book price for a 75-100 page book. But, as a publisher, my costs are pretty similar whether the book is 100 pages or 300 pages.

chrisbaker98 4y ago
According to some Sam Harris podcast I vaguely remember listening to years ago, publishers generally don't want to publish short (like <200 page) books because they don't make enough money. Longer books are more profitable because the perceived value is higher so consumers are willing to pay higher prices for them, even though they don't cost much more to print. Which is one reason why 90% of "business" books are forgettable wastes of paper that contain one or two ideas stretched out over 250 pages and serve little purpose except to advertise the author's consulting company.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I do think some historical background, case study examples, etc. can flesh out one or two basic concepts and help to give them more credibility and stickiness. But, yeah, even something like Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm probably could have been comfortably covered in 100 pages with room to spare.