Comment by tinybrain

Comment by tinybrain 3 days ago

This is my #1 gripe with non-fiction books. Way too wordy, too many anecdotes, just spit it out already.

Please value my time as the reader. I read a lot of books, but I feel like I’m allocating more mental energy skimming half the content than I am absorbing knowledge.

37signals/Basecamp had some illuminating things to say about their book experiences. They kept fighting with the publisher to make their book short, the appropriate length. The publisher kept wanting it to be double the length to seem more impressive on the shelf.

That mindset is to the detriment of books, just get to the point.

ghaff 3 days ago

Publishers in general want books that are 250+ pages. And that's probably too much for a lot of topics.

The one time I went through a publisher I definitely felt I was padding things. The second edition was better. I took out some of the padding and I fleshed out other topics that deserved it. It still barely made it to the 250-ish page point though.

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specialist 3 days ago

Do you know what the 250 page target is based on? Knowing the underlying assumptions, metrics, KPIs, or whatever, could be helpful.

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- ghaff 3 days ago
  
  I don't. I assume it's economics in the sense that consumers are probably inclined to pay less for shorter books, there are a lot of largely fixed costs associated with publishing a book, may even be some pedestrian things like reading a title on the spine in a bookstore. Basically you need some starting hardcover or trade paperback price and work back from there. Amazon has doubtless changed some of the economics especially for ebooks. But, historically, you needed a hardcover you could sell for $25.
  I've published a couple of fairly short books I didn't really care about charging for and they just wouldn't have been worth it for any publisher to feed into their funnel.
  Only somewhat on point but here's something from the late 90s. https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story.html
  
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vouaobrasil 3 days ago

Well, I think the problem is the market. When I was a teenager, I didn't mind reading all that stuff because it was all new to me. Now that I've read hundreds of books, I just want the new stuff, which occurs at more infrequent intervals in books do to past reading.

But people who have read a lot are not the main market for any book, unfortunately and seemingly paradoxically.

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