If You Have Something to Say, Be Brief and Publish it!

Josh Brown wrote a great post titled “Financial Blogging Secrets: Aesthetics.” Regarding the length of a post, he wrote:

If your visitor clicks a link, hits your page and is greeted with a wall of text, that visitor is gone.  No one wants to read something that looks like homework, no matter well written it is. Your first paragraph should never be more than one or two sentences. Each paragraph thereafter should be 3 to 4 sentences maximum. If you're over 500 words for the whole post, you better be writing something important or brilliant, otherwise just stop. The markets are moving and people won't even give your post a chance if it looks unconquerable.

When it comes down to reading books about trading, the same is true: the markets are moving, and people won’t finish them if they look unconquerable.

The end of the era of the two- to three-hundred-page business book is upon us. Publishers have been promoting thick books so they would sell better in a physical space. A thick book gives buyers the perception that they are getting their money’s worth. Who said the meaning of a book can’t be delivered in a shorter format?

For investors and traders, the opportunity cost of reading a fat brick is enormous. How about writing one of these? Ouch.

As publishing moves to digital, I believe the tyranny of the fat brick will end, and it will benefit everyone. How-to books are going to shrink in size to about twenty-five to one hundred pages. Readers will benefit by gaining the same meaning while investing a smaller amount of time reading to gain it. Self-publishing will thrive.

Publishers will continue publishing their fat bricks to satisfy the cravings of the physical stores and their bottom lines. But publishers are not the gatekeepers anymore.

For these reasons, the market for short financial publications is wide open. If you have something important to say, be brief and publish it! Digital publishing platforms make it easy for you to exploit this market with your own awesome work.

My book about creativity, flow, and trading, which will be released in a few weeks, is about 30 pages long. It is jam-packed with information so as not to waste your time.

The time I did not spend wrapping the book in another two hundred pages of coating is better spent interacting with others on liquid networks such as StockTwits and my blog.

Publishers don’t converse with their end customers, but we can!

Written by Michael Bigger. Follow me on Twitter and StockTwits.