Basics 1: Book Length
How many pages to make your book
The Basics is a series of articles designed for newer self-publishers. I’ll be sharing basic, fundamental information that will make it easier for you to make a high-quality, awesome book.
“How many pages should I make my book?”
(When I say “page” I mean one side of one piece of paper. That means the front of the paper is one page and the back a second page.)
It’s a good and interesting question that will impact every aspect of the book-making and selling processes. There’s no cut and dried answer, and here’s why.
Your book could be 50 pages long, but if there’s only 1 sentence for every spread it will feel short.
(A “spread” is 2 pages side-by-side.)
Your book could be 15 pages, but if it has small illustrations and pages filled with text, it will feel long.
So a long book can be short and a short book can be long.
Related to that: Short books don’t equal success and long books don’t equal failure. You might think that a long children’s book would naturally be boring, but some of the best selling children’s books of all time are a lot longer than you realize.
(Something else to keep in mind: The customer doesn’t read your book before buying it. The impact of the total product plus your influence as an author—and other things—sell books. We’ll talk about it in a future article).
I grabbed a big stack of children’s books off my daughter’s bookshelf and checked out their page counts. This is hardly what you would call “scientific,” but most (about 72%) of the books I had were 20-something pages. I have some Disney stories that are huge (my version of The Lion King is 95 pages long and full of text). Almost all of my Dr. Seuss books had 40 or 50-something pages. My version of the “best-selling children’s book of all time” The Little Prince is a massive 83 pages of mostly text.
If a child loves a book they will read as many pages as you give them. My daughter loves a book about monkeys and apes. It’s long, but she’s interested in the subject. If the book bores a child, 5 pages will be too many.
My answer about page count is to make your book a page-turner and don’t worry too much about the size.
To me, Dr. Seuss books feel way too long, but they work. Maybe on some level a thicker book justifies itself in the eyes of the buyer (printing costs don’t jump up too much if your book is a little bigger).
If the art is good and the book has a vibe, parents and children will just skip over a lot of the text and enjoy the book on their own terms. So don’t worry about the page count too much.
Some other considerations related to page count:
In my personal experience, authors tend either to create books that are very short (less than 14 pages) or they want to put too much text on a page, giving the book a crowded feeling. Space is good. Short books can be fine, but if you want to print hard covers be aware that printers have minimum page count requirements, and they’re all different. Check with your printer before putting your book together to see how many pages you’ll need.
The cost of printing more pages isn’t much more expensive, so cost probably won’t be an issue there. However, more pages means more artwork, which can quickly ramp up costs. We’re going to talk about commissioning artwork in the future. For now, just know that—unless you get an insane deal from an amateur artist; not necessarily something I would recommend—the artwork will be a major expense for your book project; but good artwork will sell books.
If you want to increase your page count you could put art on one side each spread and text on the other side, which will automatically double your pages. You can also use full spread artwork in place of single page artwork.
The bottom line: Don’t worry about page count. Just make an amazing book and people will love it.
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe now and never miss an update. If you’d like to support this work and become a paid subscriber you’ll gain access to subscriber only articles and the full archive. Thank you for your support.