How to make your book longer
If you’re trying to meet a publisher’s required wordcount or the standard for your chosen genre, here are some ways to make your book longer.
For nonfiction books, consider adding:
- Illustrations
- Charts & diagrams
- Case studies
- Visual examples
- Checklists
- Callouts & quotes
- Definitions or glossary
- Exercises
For novels, consider:
- Expanding key moments by going deeper (but not fluffing it up)
- – Increasing character development
- – Adding scenes & chapters to extend journey
- – Adding backstory
- – Adding supporting characters & subplots to strengthen your primary theme
- – Adding supplemental content as front matter or back matter, such as maps and history
This issue came up on the The Author Guild’s forum recently, where an author was trying to figure out what to do with the 40,000-word fantasy novella they’d written. One of the suggestions was to pair the novella with another related novella, or with a selection of related novelettes and short stories.
The impact of self-publishing and ebooks on book lengths
Traditional publishers don’t like to publish novellas because they take nearly as much editing and design work as a full-length novel. This is despite the fact that most consumers don’t mind shorter novels.
Any stigma there was around shorter books has also been lessened by ebooks. When consumers aren’t picking a book off a shelf, they’re far less aware of the length of the book.
Both of those factors means there’s a growing market for novellas and other shorter books, but that market is largely the domain of self-publishers.
Related posts:
Why are we trying to discourage aspiring novelists from publishing?
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