How long should your book be? I write a lot of management and business books, so I recently posed that question to a number of business editors. The result? Nobody agreed.

I thought the editors would say 50,000 to 60,000 words, or 200 to 250 typed pages. I figured they would want shorter manuscripts than five years ago, about 5,000 words, or 20 pages, shorter. Wrong.

True, one editor said, “Generally, I think publishers, and readers, prefer shorter books than in the past.”

But he added: “I prefer books in the neighborhood of 240-288 pages”—about 60,000 to 72,000 words. He likes this range better than short books or long ones: “Anything under 176 pages I consider problematic...anything over 300 pages is less desirable if you believe the book has foreign rights potential.”

So you should stay away from books less than 44,000 words (176 pages) or more than 75,000 (300 pages). That’s a good general rule. But one of my editors did cite 55,000 to 60,000 words as the length of today’s “typical” business book.

Of course, every rule has its exceptions, as the bestseller lists often show. Who Moved My Cheese runs about 10,000 words. Thinking, Fast and Slow runs about 170,000 words.

How do these word lengths compare to that of other books? As reported by Publishers Weekly in 2012, the median length of all books at Amazon.com is 64,531 words, which happens to be the tally for Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. 

Every word should count, of course. I asked editors if they wished authors spent more time taking the wordiness out of their text. That question hit a nerve: “Few authors spend enough time tightening their manuscripts,” one editor said.

So that’s one thing, at least, that many authors and readers agree on. Truman Capote is said to have had advice on this matter: “I believe more in the scissors than I do the pencil.”

[Revised January 2020. Originally published December 9, 2013]