Choosing Your Book Size

It might seem a simple enough decision - your publisher will only offer a few sizes, and you'll choose the book size that you like the best. Really, though, the size of the book you choose to publish can have a HUGE impact on sales.

First, a book's size gives an immediate first impression to the reader. If it's a small, standard paperback size that most romance and mystery novels come in, your reader will gear up for a fun, light read. It will look like all the other books on the shelves, in the sense that it's "normal" and "professional". Your reader will treat the book as such.

Larger books are often used for weightier subjects. You would get "Death on the Nile" in a small paperback - but you would get "Learn Advanced PHP Programming" in a bulky large size.

Also, the size of the paper affects the number of pages that get printed. For example my Believing your Eyes book was 4.25" x 6.88" on Lulu. This was 462 pages. The same book on CafePress was a TINY bit smaller, 4.18" x 6.88", and it was 464 pages. When I moved the book to CreateSpace, which has a smallest size of 5.25" x 8", the book became 300 pages long. That lost over 150 pages!!

Now on one hand you could say this is good - less pages means less printing cost, so a cheaper price for the buyer and more chance that they will buy. That is definitely true.

But on the down side, your book now looks "thinner". The buyer feels like they are getting less of a story for their money. If you sit down for the afternoon with a nicely sized book, you look forward to a long time of reading and enjoying the story. If you sat down with a super thin book, you would get a far less warm-and-fuzzy feeling.

The other thing is that you now have "lots of words" on each page, and it's harder for the human eye to scan them all. One alternative is to increase the font size so that there are fewer words again, but that is a balancing act. You don't want gigantic letters for the visitor to have to wade through! You can also slightly increase the line spacing to help the book become easier to read.

Your best bet is to get a bunch of books in your topic area, maybe at the library or bookstore, and examine their size and fonts. See which are easiest to read. You want your book to compete well against similar books. Also, see how long they tend to be. Two random romance novels I picked up in the standard small paperback size were 349 and 394 pages. So my Believing your Eyes book at 462 pages was a nice hefty length. My Badge of Honor book at 356 pages was just right. However, my books when forced into the larger CreateSpace size, so I could sell them on-demand on Amazon, became:

Badge of Honor - 250 pages
Believing your Eyes - 314 pages
Creating Memories - 248 pages
Trusting in Faith - 236 pages (still being finished)

So these larger format books "look" smaller (less thick) to the end user even though they are the normal length a person would get story-wise.

Getting Your Book Published
Writing Tips and Online Books

Online Literary Magazines

Lisa Shea's Homepage