How long should a book be?
October 12th, 2008 by Bill
I’m still on the Hugh MacLeod post I mentioned yesterday, Tribes: Ten Questions for Seth Godin. I was juggling various things yesterday so I only read the first five or so questions. I went back today and read the rest and came upon this, which touches on a favourite topic of mine:
Q: Your books and blog posts seem to have one thing in common, they seem to be getting shorter and shorter with every passing year. I have no problem with that; I think people genuinely prefer short reads, over long ones. For people aspiring to publish their own books one day, what advice would you give them re. deciding on a book’s length?
A: Try to write a book or a blog post that can’t possibly be any shorter than it is.
Exactly. This reminds me of what Steve Krug says in his book, Don’t Make Me Think! It reads something like, “Whatever you write, cut it in half. Then cut what remains in half.”
I think it’s much harder and takes a great deal more skill to keep something short.
(It seems I’ve written about brevity before. I also posted a warning note about excessive trimming. Both are posts from four years ago. Memory fades but blog posts don’t.)
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it took ten minutes to write that answer, the shortest of all my answers. I kept rewriting it, because though I was tempted to repeat myself to make it more clear, I needed to follow my own advice!
Yes, I felt the same way writing this post. “It’s too long!” I kept saying to myself. But as I said in the post, brevity is hard to achieve and, frankly, takes a lot longer to do.
(Hmm … there’s a strange though true notion: Being brief takes time.)