One of the most practical tips I can give authors toiling with a manuscript is to watch their copyfit. “Copyfit” is a term used by professionals to refer to the required word count (or column length) of an article or book. In most nonfiction books, a publishing contract will specify the length. If not, you should do so.

Copyfit helps dictate how to allocate material to each chapter. The more closely you estimate length from the start, the more efficiently you can get your chapters written. Say you have a 50,000-word book, and you plan ten chapters. Each chapter gets an average of 5,000 words.

Should you shoot for exactly 5,000 words? Well, no, but you shouldn’t write without any goal at all. Define your length, passage by passage, and write to fit.

Readers will thank you for being a copyfit cop. For one thing, your restraint on wording will prod you to deliver your message economically. More interesting, it will force you to deliver it in ways you hadn’t expected.

Say you have a long interview. It’s really fantastic, and you’d like to quote all 4,000 words of it. But your copyfit disciplines you not to do so. You can often excerpt a passage, compress insights, and end up focusing on just the really juicy stuff.

Without attention paid to copyfit, it’s easy to compose long passages that won’t fit in your book. Cutting later is hard, because you have to throw away stuff you’ve labored over. While it’s true that you can cut to fit during editing, you risk wasting huge amounts of time overwriting—and time is something you don’t have in surplus.

[Revised January 2020. Originally published February 14, 2011]