The latest and greatest way to submit your writing to the world is through e-books. These great little e-books allow authors to cheaply publish their knowledge without having to go through a traditional outlet. There is no hassle getting through an editor at a major publishing firm. All you need is a word processing program and the ability to convert the saved version to a *.pdf file. Sounds like a great idea and you are ready to start. So how long is this e-book thing?

That can be a very difficult question to answer to say the least. The traditional printed book will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 words. To give you an idea of how long that is, this simple article is approximately five hundred words, in layman’s terms that means your e-book would need to be two hundred times the length of this article. Sound daunting? Well it is, but do not worry - e-books are typically much simpler beasts. But the question remains how long should my e-book be?

The most direct route to take is to establish the reason that you are authoring the e-book in the first place. There are three general reasons for authoring an e-book. One is to establish your base of knowledge on a subject and to teach this knowledge to other people by allowing them to read your e-book. The second is to teach the reader a small amount of knowledge to then get them to purchase your second writing on the subject, or your product or service. The third reason for writing an e-book is to generate traffic to your website. Breaking each of these up lets will take a little more in-depth look at them.

The e-book that is a subject matter exercise is going to be generally the longest of the e-books. To properly cover a subject matter you are going to have to go into chapter and verse on the subject. This in-depth coverage will generally push you into approximately one hundred pages on most subject matter. This means your e-book is going to be in the range of fifty thousand words, plus you will have pictures, diagrams, and other illustrations to fill out your e-book.

If you are writing an e-book to generate traffic to your website it is going to be just long enough to cover the titled information and really not delve overly deep into your subject matter. You have to keep in mind that the desired result is the readers visit to your website. To this end your e-book should be in the range of fifteen to twenty pages with illustrations. This book will again comprise pictures, diagrams, and illustrations filling out your information.

The final e-book is the teaser e-book. In this e-book you are going to be writing to get the reader to have enough information about the subject matter to want more information about the subject. This e-book will be about thirty pages in length with various pictures, diagrams, and illustrations. The reader must feel that the book is worthwhile and a good reference, but the reader must also be left desiring more information.

At the end of the day the most important thing to remember is that your e-book no matter the length must contain valid information and be readable. If your e-book is unreadable or irrelevant then others on the web will decide that the e-book is not worth purchasing or reading. Remember for your readership you are competing against literally thousands of other e-books and a good-quality, well written short e-Book is much better than a long, poorly-written one.