on price, word count, and the beauty of short books
Obviously, publishers charge more for thicker books. They cost more to make. It's only fair. That said, the figure we landed on when I was an editor always felt like a guess, at least when working for certain publishers. You know how monkeys throwing darts outperformed professional stock traders? We should have used those monkeys.
A regular hardcover book? $24.95. A great big fat book? The kind with the title in gold foil and/or an oil painting of a historical figure on the front? $26.95? No, $27.95! Sure, why not? (Meanwhile, I'm thinking: Are they really going to let me decide? I guess they are...)
There might have been written guidelines somewhere, but I don't recall consulting any. As I recall, I picked prices for my books based on whatever other books were lying on my desk: "That one looks close enough—$25.95 it is." As with every other business-related aspect of publishing that editors like me didn't want to figure out because they didn't go to business school for a reason, there was an element of psychology to this that elevated it above petty spreadsheets and formulae. An element of readers simply won't pay more than X for Y.
At the time I entered publishing, Amazon's rising dominance—with its heavy discounting—made all these psychological "calculations" seem impossible. Sure, maybe people balked at $27.95, but it didn't cost anywhere near that much on Amazon. Meanwhile, while genre fiction is more straightforward, apple-to-apple comparison of nonfiction books is practically impossible. What does the price of The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt have to do with the price of the The Wager by David Grann? Reader aren't buying bound paper by weight here. These are just two totally different experiences that happen to be materially similar.
Physical books—with prices printed on their covers—don't lend themselves to A/B price testing. Would Eat, Pray, Love still have achieved bestsellerdom at a dollar more? Two? Meanwhile, would that ambitious micro-history not have vanished from bookshelves at a dollar less? These questions are...unpleasant to contemplate. You don't want to think that it's about the price like, you know, a product. Editors love books. As buyers ourselves, we don't make our book selections based on price. For most people, it's a factor. We had a hard time grasping that.
Pricing seemed arbitrary, sure. But so did length. How many words do you really need about the early Roman Empire, or cryptocurrency, or dog rescues? The book proposals that agents sent me often included a word count estimate, but these nearly always turned out to be complete guesses. In the end, manuscripts routinely came in well over the estimate. So what? Charge a buck or two more!
At the time, the thinking was that bigger books took up more shelf space, making them more prominent. At Barnes and Noble, you'd spot that big fat slab first and pick it up. Then, Seth Godin wisely figured that a shelf dominated by big books would make a really thin one pop. So he kept The Dip to something like 30,000 words. He was right: skinny stood out.
Today, length is often moot. Readers may get angry if you sell a super-short one on Kindle for $12.99, angry reviews, but most of the time, we buy books with no real sense of how long they are. That's an advantage for would-be authors! You can write a relatively short book—less than 40,000 words—and it still counts. It can still accomplish your goals. If writing a book sounds daunting, write a shorter one!
Montaigne claimed he had a weak memory, but credited the flaw with developing his other strengths:
Had [memory] made the ideas and opinions of others easily available to me, my wit and my intelligence would have become passive and sluggish, dependent on someone else and expending no effort of their own. Also because I am less talkative for it since memory’s storehouse is more easily filled with material than that of ideas. If my memory had been better, I would have talked my friends’ ears off.
Authors who accumulate vast amounts of information related to their topic tend to believe that readers need all of it to accept their thesis. The era of the doorstop is drawing to a close. Sure, if every anecdote entertains, include each one. Yes, if the research is memorable and makes for good cocktail-party fodder, share the highlights. But honestly, if you have something to say, say it. Get in, get out, write another book if you have so much energy.
For example: Austin Kleon pointed me to The Motern Method, a short self-published book on creativity by ultra-prolific songwriter Matt Farley. It's 131 pages, but with lots of white space, maybe 20,000 words? Regardless, it works. It's a good book about being more creative. It can't have taken Farley long to write, and it didn't take me long to finish. In short, I was more than happy with what my twenty bucks bought me.
Most important is that, successful or not, you'll learn way more by writing and publishing two or three short books in a relatively short time than grinding away for a decade at an overly ambitious one. Write the short one first, at least. You can always write the doorstop next time.