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Too short for a business book
Cutting the draft in half
The publisher was thrilled with the 50,000-word draft because it fit the size of a business book. Then Jason and DHH went back through it and cut it in half, shrinking some essays from two pages to four paragraphs.
The publisher's panic
The publisher panicked. A business book at 25,000 words looked like a pamphlet, so it had to be padded with spacing, margins, and illustrations to reach book length.
Getting Real
The instinct goes back to Getting Real in 2006, where most chapters ran half a page and some ran three paragraphs. Nobody was trying to be brief then. Each chapter was simply one idea distilled to its core, and by the later books that gut-level brevity had to be recovered by cutting.
Why do business books run so long?
Trade nonfiction commonly runs between 50,000 and 80,000 words, and publishers price and shelve books partly by their heft. A thin book can look like poor value to a buyer comparing covers in a store. Many business books are built on a single idea that would fit in an article, then expanded with case studies to reach that length. Magazine features that carry one idea commonly run between 2,000 and 5,000 words.
How does cutting make writing stronger?
William Strunk Jr. told writers in The Elements of Style to omit needless words, and the rule has been repeated in writing classes for a century. Fewer words leave less room for the reader's attention to drift. The French mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote in his Provincial Letters in 1657 that he had made a letter longer only because he lacked the time to make it shorter.
How do publishers stretch a short manuscript?
Page count in a printed book is controlled by typesetting choices such as type size, line spacing, margins, and the white space around chapter openings. Adding illustrations or pull quotes fills more pages without adding chapters. A manuscript of 25,000 words can be set in this way to fill a book of 150 pages or more. Printers and binders have minimum page counts below which a spine is too thin to print a title on.
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