A paperback can start to feel a bit too thin below about 100 pages, which is somewhere around the 20,000-word mark. But rather than artificially pad out the words, it’s better to increase the pages via thoughtful layout. This makes it feel more “booky” without unnecessarily taxing the reader’s time. For example, there are shockingly few words in the category-breaking best-seller Business Model Generation by Osterwalder and Pigneur. And yet, thanks to its heavy use of helpful diagrams, illustrations, and creative typography, it feels undeniably substantial.
