So you’re all set to write your e Book. You’ve got the subject. You know who you are writing the a course in miracles for. You’re all ready to lay out the points you want to discuss and you’ve now got a problem.
Don’t worry. It’s a common issue. I get asked all the time, how long the average length of an e Book is. You’re in good company. Unfortunately, there’s no straight answer. Or more correctly the answer is in the process of changing.
Historically, e Books have been short. Reading them involved sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen for long periods of time. So naturally, they were more useful when they contained only the necessary information. It wasn’t unusual for full size e Books to be 20 pages long. And in fact, fifty or so pages made for a good length for an e Book. Certainly you didn’t want to exceed one hundred.
This of course, led to abuses. Very short article length pieces were sold — and priced — as if they were full sized e Books. After all, people wanted specific answers to their questions and they were willing to pay for those answers. And nobody really wanted to read more on the computer than they needed to.
At the same time, traditional paper based books were getting longer. Instead of an average book being 200 pages or so, they grew to 300 to 400 pages. Long books became 400 to 600 pages and more. In fact, many long books had to be released as multi-volume sets.
Self-help books were also affected by this trend. Where before, executive books were between 50 and 150 pages they grew to be between 100 and 200 pages in length. Standard length self-help books grew to being 300-400 words on average.
As long as e Books were computerized and books were paper this trend had no cross effect on the length of e Books. They didn’t really compete with each other.
But all that has changed now.
With the rise of the Kindle, Kobo, iPad, and the myriad of other alternatives, books and e Books have begun to compete directly with each other. It’s no longer hard to read an e Book. And most publishers have boosted their e Book lists by republishing their traditional lists in e Book format.
The result has been a ground swell change in e Books. Prices have dropped and lengths are increasing.
So what is the new average length of an e Book?
Well it depends.
e Books now are moving towards the same length as regularly published books. Self help e Books need to be between 100 and 200 pages (twenty five to fifty thousand words) now. It is likely in fact, that they will continue to increase until they meet the same criteria as a printed book.