Why are self-help books soOOOooo long?!

There are so many brillinant self help / raising children books that I want to read, the problem is that I am just never going to get a chance to read them, as each one is between 200 to 300 words! As if I am ever going to get round to reading a handful, never mind the 20 also that I would like to read!

Okay so I get it for a fictional book, it's purely for pleasure and of course they need to be hundreds pages to introduce the characters and go through their story, but for a self - help book, does it really need to be over 200 words long??! If you need help then you don’t usually have hours and hours do you spend reading a book, you usually want to just have the main points summarised so that you can easily read and digest them, and then carry out the recommendations.

So I get that the author needs to make money from his expertise but I would be happy to pay the same, if not more for the main findings to be summarised in a easily digestible form rather than paying for a whole book that I am never going to get round to reading! Or perhaps authors could even summarise the main findings at the beginning or the end of the book... I know that some books do this at the end of the chapter which I think its brilliant but it would be even better if it was all in one section and it could be read and digested in say half an hour. I wonder how many of you feel the same? And I wonder how I can go about changing this. There is a book on parenting that I really want to read at the moment, and I even contacted the author explaining that I didn't have the time and could he summarise the main points, and I got back a very clear 'no'.  

I would love to be a much more knowledgeable person but I don’t have the time to read these books, but if each one had the information in it easily digestible form then I would be a much better mother I am sure, and a much better person generally too!

I would love to know your thoughts x


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