BLOATED BOOKS — A thread. I mostly read nonfiction, I'd say about 70% nonfiction, and lately I've been researching a particular slice of history that requires me to go back 80+ years. It surprised me how lean and efficient most (if not all) of these older nonfiction books are.

I've always jumped around with various topics, reading modern or older nonfiction on history, how-to, biographies, whatever. For the last year or so, I've been fully immersed in older nonfiction and not much else. The efficiency I've found is wonderful and refreshing.

Maybe it's a sign of changes in editing, but I suspect much of the filler is wedged in to EXPAND the spines for shelf display, or build up what marketing people refer to as 'perceived value' - the idea that larger books contain more, and therefore, are worth more. Nonsense.

That's not to say a book must be small. I love it when a book is thick and jam-packed with content from cover to cover. That's VALUE, so use as many pages as you need. But when the book requires fewer pages, trim those pages. Kill your darlings AND your filler.

Maybe someone is already doing this, I suspect it's being done heavily in the world of business books since these readers tend to focus heavily on efficiency, but it's severely lacking in most areas of nonfiction.

It's painful to open a book and see an author spend five chapters explaining why a particular problem is, in fact, a problem. Yes. We know it's a problem, that's why we bought your book. Eventually, the writer will begin vamping, and continue to do so page after page.

Like most nonfiction readers, I've developed a quick skim approach to weeding out which paragraphs and chapters I could safely skip before skipping, but that's not what we WANT to be doing. We want to be fully immersed in a book.

In truth, we pay for all this filler with wasted money, but we also pay for it with wasted time, the most precious expense of all. I'd love to see top publishers take this on. Charge the same price if you need to, but trim the fat, all of the fat.

I'm certain that with a good editor, this Twitter thread could have been a whole lot shorter, and for that, I apologize.

Note, I am aware of efforts of third-party writers and podcasters that strip everything out and present the ideas of the book in a condensed form. I've read and listened to many. But my call is for authors and publishers to take this on directly.