​How long should a book be?


The UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization declared 49 pages to be the minimum length for a book. A publication with fewer pages can be a leaflet, pamphlet, booklet or brochure. Call it a book, and you risk offending nearly 200 nations.



The maximum page number is determined by printing equipment and how much people are willing to pay, carry and read.



Despite the UNESCO decree, no book has 49 pages. Books have an even number of pages even if some pages don’t have numbers on them. An individual piece of paper in a book is called a leaf. Each leaf has two sides, called pages. A 100-page book contains 50 leafs. Or leaves.



Publishers don’t have to obey the United Nations. Outskirts Press can make “books” with as few as 18 pages. Most publishers can produce books with as many as 1,000 pages.



With nonfiction, you need to have enough pages to cover your topic adequately. Don’t skimp, or pad. The book should not be so big that it will be priced a lot higher than its competitors or seem like “too much to read.” It should not be so short that it seems incomplete, or doesn’t offer value for its cost.



The cost of each additional page is insignificant. There is a prejudice against very thin books, so try for a minimum of about 120 pages. Thin books just don’t seem like real books.

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Novels can be much longer than nonfiction. Tolstoy’s War and Peace is about 1300 pages long.



An e-book, can be any length you want -- even just one page.