How to make your book shorter

Most business and how-to books are too long. Overall, such books are getting shorter, and yours probably should be, too.

Twenty years ago, most business books were about 65,000 to 70,000 words long. Now, with shorter attention spans and more impatient readers, a better target length is 45,000 words. If you think in pages, that 150 to 180 pages, not 250 to 300.

Shorter books are not just faster to read. They’re faster to edit and cheaper to print. Carrying extra weight around is hard on your body; carrying extra pages around is hard on you as a writer, hard on your publisher, and hard on your reader.

Three ways to make book a shorter

There are three basic techniques for shrinking a book: fewer chapters, shorter chapters, and fewer words.

Fewer chapters

A typical business book might have 12 chapters of 5,000 words. The first chapter lays out the urgent problem and describes the idea. Then you’ve got a chapter or two diving deeper into the problem, a few chapters explaining the solution, and the remaining chapters exploring that solution in more detail. There’s also typically a final, more visionary chapter.

Ask yourself: How much time do you need to spend on the reader’s problem? You’ve probably been thinking about it a lot. But the reader is already inclined to believe the problem is real, since they picked up your book about it. Don’t spend more than one chapter on the dimensions of the problem.

If your solution is a four-step process, you probably need chapters to describe each step. What else do you need? Look carefully at the list of chapters you’ve got describing the solution. Could you combine or cut a few? Are you including them just to show off your knowledge, or do they contribute meaningfully to the value you’re providing? Would your reader actually miss them if they were gone?

Don’t cut the last, visionary chapter. It’s likely to be short and inspirational. Without it, you’ve lost your satisfying ending.

Shorter chapters

Your chapters likely follow a template, for example, case study, big insight, research to back up your insight, dimensions of a solution, practical example.

Try not to cut the case study, since it’s what makes the text human and relatable. But you might be able to get away with a paragraph about the research, rather than a whole section, deleting references that make the same point redundantly. And how much detail do you need about the solution? Would a set of bullets make the point as effectively as a collection of subsections?

The key to shorter chapters is eliminating redundancy. If it was in Chapter 2, you don’t need to repeat it in Chapter 6. As an editor, I look for phrases like “As we described earlier” as clear indicators of trimmable redundancies.

Fewer words

I can usually turn a 5,000-word chapter into a 4,000-word chapter with nothing more than my editorial scalpel.

Most writers are wordy. It’s easier to write without worrying about length and edit later. That’s fine, as long as you actually do edit later.

Start with the case study. Most writers spend too much time on detail; cut anything that’s not essential to enabling the reader to relate to the person, their challenge, and their solution.

Now look at the rest of the text. What sentences are saying the same thing again? What phrases are just throat-clearing and warmups? What phrases are just adding bulk without adding meaning? If you’ve got the right mindset and a word-count goal, you can usually cut plenty of words without reducing the value you provide. If you lack the needed perspective to be your own brutal editor, hire one.

Shorter is often qualitatively better

A funny thing happens when you eliminate unneeded chapters, shorten the ones that remain, and trim the words that aren’t contributing much.

What remains becomes intensely useful and dense with meaning. Your prose will become muscular and compelling. All it takes is deleting what doesn’t belong.

Take the time to shrink your prose to fighting weight. Your reader will thank you — and tell their friends that your book is must-read.