The first book I ever wrote and published was about 100 pages long. If you asked me at the beginning if I could write that many pages, if I had that much to say, I would have said “No.” and “No.” When you’re writing about your expertise, your story, your message, you’re going to be able to fill as many pages as you want. The question of “How long should my book be?” is actually about “What does your reader need?” Let’s talk through the five main things you need to think about to make sure your book is the right size for your reader.
When I was a professor, I gave clear, detailed instructions on how long writing assignments should be. The reason? When I was a student, I hated when my teachers would say, “Oh, however long it needs to be to get your point across.” Any point you make can be a paragraph or a book. It depends on your message, your readers, and you. I promise you are not going to get five pages in and realize you have nothing to say.
Research your audience.
The first thing I’ll ask you to think about is your reader. You should always have your audience in mind before you start writing. The more you know about them, the more you’re going to be able to make clear, strong, reasonable, logical, and educated decisions that don’t rely on that inner critic telling you you’re not good enough.
Let’s use myself as an example. Every week, I release a YouTube video and an accompanying blog. Whenever this goes out to our newsletter subscribers, about two-thirds of y’all click through to the video. One-third click over to blog post. Why? Because there are different types of consumers.
People who read the blog post version generally want to digest information a little more or want to quickly scan it. Folks who want to watch the video tend to be more relational. They want to hear someone tell a story, maybe take a walk while listening along.
For readers, there are different types of needs. We’re not talking about a 20-minute investment to watch a video. We’re talking about hours of their life and money to put down to pay for that book. What are your readers looking for? Do they want a book or audiobook? Do they want a blog post or a series of podcasts?
What if your readers want all kinds of things? An easy tip: If everyone tells you that you should write a book, then write a book. It means that people are actively engaged with your story and want all the details.
If you’re a leader, this might come in a different form, usually curiosity. People will come to you with complex questions. They want to know the why behind what you’re saying. They want more detail, stories, experiences, anecdotes, metaphors. They want the information that lets them sit and process what you say. If you’re getting these questions when you share your story, it’s a great sign your readers are interested in a book.
If the questions you tend to get are things you can email or answer quickly, you might want to think about doing a podcast or blog to get those simple answers out. If you’ve got stories, lived through some stuff, social media posts are not going to cut it and you should go for a book.
Now, should that book be? This varies, but what I try to aim for is about 200 pages for a standard memoir. If you know your reader wants a quick read, you can go with about 100 pages. We’ve had memoirs and leadership books do really well at 100 pages, about 30,000 words, because readers can bop right through that. 100 pages is also a great length for an audiobook.
This is in contrast to novels. Novels are usually over 100,000 words. Many times when we’re talking nonfiction, people want something shorter. There have been successful longer memoirs, but if your audience is going to be rushed, or they aren’t used to reading books, 100 pages is a great goal to give them a story and the details they need.
Find out what your readers already know.
The second point is to consider is how much your audience already knows. When we’re thinking about our audience, we assume that we are our audience. The only way to figure out what your reader already knows is to ask. Find someone who is your ideal reader, see what they already know and if they’re interested in learning more.
I’ll give you an example of a brilliant CEO I’ve worked with. She has a way of running business that is incredibly values-based. We follow it in our company. You lay out what your values are, three to five core values, and use them to make every single decision in your business. The way she presents this is mind-blowing. It makes you wonder about all the decisions you’ve made in your life and think, “Where was I working out of my values, and where was I working out of something like FoMO?”
When she and I talked early in the process of her writing her book, she told this to others and they were shocked by it. She said, “I saw people stop taking notes and just process.” People would come up to her afterwards and say, “This is game-changing.”
It’s easy to think this simple concept doesn’t need to be explained. A blog post would have done such a disservice because of using a minimal amount of words. This concept was an excellent candidate for, at least, an 100-page book, maybe even longer.
Really think about what your audience actually knows and not what you think they know. Consider this not out of a space of fear, but rather out of evidence. Give your reader exactly what they want, and they’ll love it because you’ve catered it to deliver what they need.
Know when to change your pace.
Next, I want you to consider where you need to slow down and where you need to speed up. The simple rule of thumb is anytime you move through a scene that’s very action-packed, you want the reader to feel that adrenaline rush along with you. Short sentences and short paragraphs are the norm. If we have dialogue, we want to keep it short. Skip the tags “he said” or “she said” so that you can propel your reader quickly through the action and story.
We also want to make sure that your audience has all the background information that they need to understand what’s happening. We don’t want to slow down at the beginning of a memoir. We want to move fast and grab our reader’s attention. Around chapter three or four, you can start to give more background and build out who you are.
I’ve talked about a client, our amazing political memoirist, Wendy Davis. She ran for Utah State Senate and wanted to write a book that would highlight how power structures she came up against were harmful to democracy. We had to think about how people would react to particular bodies being written, as some topics in the book included gender oppression and fatphobia. We started at the beginning of her political story. As we came to places where something in her present life triggered something from her childhood, we used those jumping-off points for flashbacks.
While I support not overusing flashbacks in your writing, a memoir is a genre where it calls for giving more background. There are points where your reader wants to slow down and process what they’re reading. This can happen at major turning points in your story, which are great points to drop truth or knowledge or emphasize a message.
In Wendy’s case, she’s explained how power structures are built over many years. She witnessed an incident in her middle school cafeteria that really changed the way she thought about abuses of power, an important point of her book. She wanted the reader to slow down, process and get to understand her motivation in her memoir.
Where do you need to slow down? Where do you need to speed up? Thinking about this will help you feel more comfortable with the length of your memoir and help you feel like you won’t bore your reader to death.
Consider how your readers respond to your stories.
The fourth thing I want to talk about are what aspects your story people tend to respond to. All of us communicate through stories. There will always be stories that really land as you’re telling them, even if you feel silly saying them.
Thinking about how different stories land is a great way to gain confidence about what to include. It defines how long your book is. If you’re making a point and giving three stories to drive that point home, your book’s going to be longer than if you give a quick little example and move on.
I want to talk about a coaching client that I’m working with. He’s working on a career advice book for those starting up new businesses while sharing pitfalls learned along the way. He’s got about 30 chapters, each highlighting a person he’s worked with over the years.
When brainstorming, he made a list of common issues he saw his clients experiencing. When we laid it out and realized he’s going to have 30 chapters, we made them bite-sized chapters. He wanted people to pick up the book, flip to a chapter, scan through it, and have a takeaway that could apply to them.
We knew those chapters were going to be short, maybe 1,500 to 2,00 words, and about five to seven pages a chapter. Once you know you need 30 chapters, you know how long the book will be. The great thing about a structure like this is when you ask for feedback. If people feel like it’s too long, it’s easy to cut down. You’ll have a perfect-sized book every time.
Make your content easy to process.
Our last tip is how to break down your idea into bite-sized pieces. This takes all other pieces of advice into account to think about your book holistically. When I mean bite-size pieces, I mean the building blocks that make your message make sense.
One tip I often give to people who want to write a memoir is to brain dump everything you want to say. Every story, message, idea, person, without a filter. What I find is that people will build a list of hundreds of items and others will come with a list of 4 or 5. Usually, those that have the shorter list fear they don’t have enough to be called a book. For the shorter lists, take the first item and brain dump everything that goes into that item. Even if you come away with 5, 10 or 15 points to start with, you have subpoints within those points.
For example, maybe you have a point that says, “oldest daughter born.” Well, oldest daughter born is not one point, right? When you have that first baby, it’s an exciting, scary, nerve-wracking time in your life. That’s a great example of a point to stop and think about the smaller details. Talk about any prenatal care, when you found out when you were first pregnant, hurdles with doctor visits, how family reacted, and the list goes on. All those are individual points that fit into your book.
We make our lists at the ground level, all the details. Then, we think through what your audience cares about, how they read, what they want to hear and the pace of it all. All other tips I gave are going to pack into your list of topics to make sure your book is exactly the right size, but you’ve got to make the list.
If you are finding it’s too hard to do this on your own, you might need a ghostwriter or a book coach. If that’s the case, I have an exciting announcement. Our Change Maker package is a brand-new package that will give you ghostwriting and editing support to bring your story to life, even if you’re not a writer. While that package is only available to our newsletter subscribers right now, head over to our book strategy quiz to stay informed when this package is released to the public and get a ton of helpful information along the way!
Happy writing!
