90% Of Books Should Have Been A Blog Post

Here’s another easy showerthought for you while I’m still fighting off baby brain.

This idea came out of last week’s podcast.

Your willingness to purchase a book — or almost anything else — is based on the perceived effort it took to create that item.

Think fancy croissant or designer donut for $3.99 instead of a $0.99 Krispy Kreme.

So how does this relate to books?

For anyone that does a lot of reading, you’ll find that most non-fiction books follow a similar pattern.

Each one is around 250 pages long.

~20 pages are self-promotional or explaining why this idea will change your life.

~20 pages are the summary at the end of the book.

~10 pages are the new idea you want to learn.

~200 pages are examples of this idea being found or applied in other areas of life.

This means if you read the book — presumably to learn the idea — you are learning the idea with about 4% efficiency. You are spending 96% of your time reading the book not learning anything new.

There is some value to repetition of examples for knowledge retention. The ratio isn’t that large though!

So then why doesn’t everyone write books that are 10 pages long?

It seems like a win-win. The reader doesn’t have to read 200 pages of fluff and the author doesn’t have to spend 2 years of their life researching examples for the book.

Money.

An author still has to make money for writing the book.

As I mentioned before, the price you’re willing to pay for something is directly proportional to the amount of effort you think went into it.

It would be very hard for an author to charge $19.99 for a 10 page book. You probably had a visceral reaction to that sentence. Yeah right, I’m not paying for that!

You want to see that they took enough time to warrant your money.

But what are you actually paying for?

The idea.

Most ideas can be articulated in a well thought out blog post. It’s just harder to monetize. It requires authors become expert marketers, not just writers.

Counterintuitively, you pay more for an idea in a 250 page book than you do for an idea in a 10 page book.

You’re paying money AND time.

This is why high level creative work is charged based on deliverables. By charging per hour, creatives are incentivized to make a project last longer, costing their clients time. Watch Chris Do break down why you should never charge hourly.

Most businesses are willing to pay a premium to have the work done faster.

This concept is at the heart of why I started DSTLLD two years ago. I know most people are limited by time, not money.

For a quick method to increase your reading efficiency by 96%, check out Shortform.