There are a lot of different schools of thought about how long an ebook should be and how your one should be depends on the particular situation and the niche that you’re marketing for. In this article, I’m going to suggest three common lengths often used for online ebooks and the reasons why they might be appropriate for you. When you read this article you can then put this together and make a balanced decision to help you when you’re planning out your overall ebook strategy.
Eight pages is a popular length for shorter ebooks. An 8 page ebook can generally be written in one sitting. After all, 8 pages, by the time you take a Title page, a Disclaimer page and a Contents page into account, as well as perhaps a set of Resources at the end, only really leaves you with a need for 4 pages of content. That’s somewhere between 1500 and 2000 words at common ebook print sizes. You can soon polish this off within an afternoon, if you’ve already got an idea of what you’re writing about. Or even during a whole day if you wish to do some research to go with it.
Eight pages could be a good length for ebooks you want to go viral or you wish to give away. After all, then you’re not providing your best content for free, but you are providing enough that will interest people in finding out about your future products. If that’s your aim, then an 8 page ebook could be for you.
A 20 page ebook is a common length when you start to get into the realm of selling an ebook. This might often be presented as a $7 product. It can be the start of a sales funnel into a larger ebook in the long run. It could also be a good way of getting going with writing a first ebook. After all, if you write five 20 page ebooks, that’s the equivalent of a 100 page ebook, then you could always find some way to merge these shorter reports together to form a longer ebook in the long run. So if you’re just looking to develop a sales funnel list and to explore whether a particular niche is likely to be of long-term effectiveness, a 20 page ebook can be the way to go.
The final option I have for you is a 100 page ebook. Now, this could cover really any length of about 50 or over. Once you’ve got a 100 page ebook you’re putting a substantial time, research and effort into producing the ebook. You had to go into a certain amount of depth. Now this still is far less depth than a physical book. After all, a 100 page ebook is probably equivalent to at least 60 or 70 pages of a typical physical book because of font sizes and layout is different. So this is only three, four or five chapters again depending on the physical book. But it still takes a large amount of planning and writing time. You need to make sure that you can present the topic and enough information and have the appropriate detail there to give good value for money afterwards. This is likely to be a $27 or $37 ebook, particularly if you couple it with some bonuses to give real long-term value to your reader.
That hopefully should give you enough information to make a sensible decision about how long your ebook should be. If you’re just getting started you should be looking at an 8 or 20 page ebook, the length largely dependent on how you want to sell it and market it. If you’ve got a well established niche and you’ve got a captive audience there already waiting for you, then you could well go to a 100 page ebook. Each of the profitability of these would depend on your own situation and your long-term marketing strategies.