Quick answer: For a nonfiction book that brings in clients and speaking gigs, I recommend 150 to 250 pages, which works out to roughly 40,000 to 60,000 words. That’s the range I recommend whether your book is about health, parenting, relationships, or leadership. But page count doesn’t decide whether someone reads to the end. A short book can lose a reader by chapter three just as fast as a long one. Readers finish a book because of what’s in it and how you deliver it: one clear promise, stories they can see themselves in, and teaching they can actually use. Readers who finish are the ones who reach out.
When it comes to writing a book that actually builds your business, LESS is usually MORE. By less, I mean fewer topics, with each one taught well.
And when I say “business book,” I mean any nonfiction book that grows your business. The topic can be health and wellness, relationships, parenting, personal style, or thought leadership. What makes it a business book is that it brings clients, speaking gigs, and partnerships to your business.
I keep seeing the same pattern with smart and savvy business owners and entrepreneurs who come to me after months (or years!) of struggling with their manuscripts:
- They’ve written 30+ chapters of content
- They’ve poured their heart and soul into 100,000+ words
- They’re completely overwhelmed and no closer to finishing
This happens all the time. And it’s not your fault.
I know you want this book to be amazing, and I know that cutting the good stuff out can be hard. But you want your book to make an impact AND make money, so let’s talk about how long it should be and what actually keeps a reader reading.
How Long Should a Business Book Be?
Aim for 150 to 250 pages. That gives you enough room to teach one method well, and it respects how much time your reader is giving you.
Page count changes with trim size and font. A standard 6×9 paperback holds roughly 250 to 300 words a page, so 150 to 250 pages works out to about 40,000 to 60,000 words. To make the writing easier, I give my clients a simple structure to start from: an introduction plus nine chapters. At about 5,000 words a chapter, that puts a first draft right around 50,000 words, and each book can flex from there to fit what it needs to teach.
Length is the easy part, though. What decides whether someone reads to the last page is what’s in the book and how you deliver it. I build every client’s book around ONE Damn Good Book™ with:
- ONE clear promise
- ONE framework, built from the method you already use with clients
- ONE transformation for your reader
When every chapter serves that one promise, your book lands in that range on its own.
Your book teaches the What, the Why, and the Way of your method. The Work, which is the hands-on help applying it to one reader’s life, stays in your paid program. That split keeps the book focused, and it keeps you from stuffing in everything you know.
It also makes your book easier to write, and better at bringing in high-ticket clients, speaking opportunities, and brand authority, because your readers will actually enjoy it and finish reading it.
Are Shorter Business Books Selling Better?
We’ve been taught that value equals volume: that a “real book” needs to be thick enough to double as a doorstop, and that readers will judge your expertise by page count.
Some of the most impactful nonfiction books of our time are surprisingly concise:
- Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller: 240 pages (on the upper end of the ideal range)
- The War of Art by Steven Pressfield: 165 pages (short and focused on creative blocks)
- The 5 Second Rule by Mel Robbins: 238 pages (on building confidence by taking action)
- The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo: 224 pages (on clearing out your home and keeping it that way)
- The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown: 208 pages in the 10th anniversary edition (on letting go of perfectionism)
- The Dip by Seth Godin: 80 pages (focused on knowing when to quit and when to stick)
Seth Godin is his own category, though. He’s written 21 bestselling books, and he’s been blogging since 1999, with more than 10,000 posts. His content library is so big that he doesn’t need more than 80 pages to make his point. When you’re writing your first book and building your own thought leadership and credibility, you don’t have decades of books and blog posts doing that work for you, so your book has to do more of it on its own.
Bestsellers have been getting shorter, too. Scribe Media looked at #1 New York Times nonfiction bestsellers and found the average length dropped from 467 pages in 2011 to 273 pages in 2017. A bigger study points the same way: WordsRated looked at 3,444 New York Times bestsellers and found the average bestseller got 51.5 pages shorter from 2011 to 2021, going from 437.5 pages to 386.
What that tells me is that readers are guarding their time, and they reward the books that respect it.
I say this to clients all the time: when someone buys your book, the $25 is the small part. What they’re really handing you is 8, 10, maybe 12 hours of their life, and they’ll never get those hours back. That’s a big ask from a busy person (especially one with a business, a family, and a stack of half-read books on the nightstand).
Those hours are also where the trust gets built. Over 8 or 12 hours, a reader absorbs your way of thinking and gets to know you, which is more time than any sales call or social post will ever get. So every page has to be worth the time they’re giving it.
Pin for later ⤵️
Why Do Business Books Get So Long?
A business coach came to me with a first draft that was essentially three books crammed into one. She had 32 chapters covering everything from mindset to marketing to management.
“I have to include EVERYTHING or my book won’t stand up against the other business books,” she told me.
But unfortch, that’s the WRONG call, because when you include too much, your book gets harder to finish, and readers who don’t finish don’t reach out.
I see books get long for three reasons:
- You’re afraid of leaving something out. Like that coach, you worry a shorter book will look thin next to the competition.
- You haven’t decided what stays in your paid work. Without that decision, everything goes in the book, and you end up worrying you’re giving away too much while the book keeps growing.
- You’re writing more than one book at once. Mindset, marketing, and management could each be their own book, and putting all three in one makes each of them weaker.
Another client came with a 40-chapter draft about leadership. After our mapping session, we narrowed it down to 12 focused chapters around ONE central framework.
“But won’t readers feel cheated if I don’t give them everything?” my client asked.
Noooo girl, it’s the OPPOSITE. When you cram everything into your book, you DILUTE your message, and you spend those 8 to 12 hours of your reader’s life on things they didn’t come for.
How Do You Cut Your Book Down without Losing the Good Stuff?
When I work with clients, the first thing I often recommend is SUBTRACTION.
Subtraction gets easier once your book is mapped, because you can check every section against your one promise. If it moves your reader toward that promise, it stays. If it doesn’t, it comes out, and the hands-on Work stays in your paid program where it belongs.
Cutting is about delivery as much as length. In the acknowledgments of A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking wrote that someone told him each equation he included would halve the book’s sales. He kept only one, E=mc², and the book has sold more than 25 million copies in 40 languages. He kept the physics and cut the part that would have stopped most readers from getting to it.
The hardest cuts are the ones that feel important to you. My client Bridget worked on her book, That One Small Voice, with me, and in our interview after it came out she said that when you’re writing a book, “you can go off on a tangent because you have thoughts and you think that that’s important.” What helped her was an outside read. She told me she “needed direction” from me “on what to elaborate on, what to eliminate,” so the book kept its focus and readers kept turning pages.
Every tangent feels important when it’s your own story, which is why someone outside the book makes those calls easier.
Trimming happens at the sentence level, too. ProWritingAid’s reports on overused words and sentence length show you where a chapter repeats itself, so you can cut words without cutting ideas. (Here’s my full ProWritingAid review.) You can get a discount with my ProWritingAid affiliate link.
How Short Is Too Short for a Business Book?
There’s a floor, too, and I see a lot of offers aimed right at it. Some promise you can “write your book in a weekend” in Instagram ads. Others sell a 30- to 60-page book as the fast track to authority.
Those “books” are usually shorter than most restaurant menus. They’ll get you a cover to post about, but they won’t get you a stage or a reputation. And good luck getting anyone to recommend one, or to move up to a high-ticket program from something with no real substance.
A 30- to 60-page book takes an hour or two to read, which isn’t enough time to teach the What, the Why, and the Way of your method, and it’s nowhere near the 8 to 12 hours it takes for a reader to really get to know you and trust how you think.
So the goal is enough book to do the job, told well, and not one page of filler past that.
When the content and the delivery are right, readers start moving toward you before they even finish. One leadership consultant I worked with had readers buy her $5K leadership intensive before they’d finished chapter 3.
Why Write Your Book with Me?
I’ve worked on books since 2014 and coached nonfiction authors since 2018, and one of the most common things I help business owners with is deciding what their book leaves out, so the pages that stay are worth every hour a reader gives them. You can work with me in three ways:
- Damn Good Book™, my small-group program. We map your book together before you write, and you draft one chapter a week alongside other business owners. Your Book Map shows what goes in every chapter, so you don’t spend weeks writing chapters you’ll cut later.
- Author Alchemy, my 10-month 1:1 program. We map your book in Month 1, you get weekly feedback on every chapter, and you can have the editing and publishing handled through Virgo House, my publishing imprint.
- The Book Bestie™ Hotline, where you send me your book strategy questions on Voxer for up to 3 months. It’s for the strategy before you start writing, so you know which book to write and what it needs to do for your business before you put a single chapter on the page.
If you’re not sure what your book should do for your business, take the quiz. It takes about two minutes.
Because y’all, life’s too short for doorstop books that nobody finishes reading. Also… super embarrassing, right? Let’s not be that person.
Let’s create something that matters instead.
Your nonfiction book bestie
Hi, I’m Holly.
I’m Holly Ostrout, a nonfiction book and publishing coach. I’ve worked on books since 2014 and coached nonfiction authors since 2018. I help entrepreneurs (mostly women) write one Damn Good Book™ that brings in clients, lands speaking gigs, and makes their business simpler, smarter, and more visible.
If this article resonated, here’s what to do next
Find out which kind of book fits your business goals with the free, 2-minute $100K Book Strategy Quiz.
Get real answers to your book strategy questions on Voxer for up to 3 months, so you start the right book.
Write the first draft of your nonfiction book in 90 days, with every chapter mapped and a small group.
