As you may know, A Few More Thoughts was my 28th and final book. Reflecting on 20 years of authoring books, I decided to summarize my work for my own interest and perhaps yours as well. Here is a complete list of books:
And I was curious to know how many pages the books comprise…
5486 Pages
As one reader noted:
5486 pages in twenty years. It would take an average reader ~155 hours and 30 minutes to read through that body of work once. Careful study would likely require 2 to 3 times as long (if not longer).
My response was:
The good news is that it is much less than the (likely) ~15,000 hours it took me to research and write 28 books over a 20 year period. I did the work so readers don’t have to!
As an author and largely responsible for promoting my own work, these days there are three big problems with books from potential readers’ perspective:
- Automatically labeling books as “theoretical” (textbook anchoring bias)
- Most people imagine books to very difficult to read, like a school textbook
- Dread thick books, often the result of verbosity
I sought to remedy these problems by assuring that my books were practical, easy to read, and as few pages as possible. Of my 28 books, 19 are under 200 pages.
And I was curious to know how many words were in each book according to the word count feature in Microsoft Word (excludes the writings by Woollard and Gilbreth, but includes quotes by others that were used in the books).
How many total words did I write? Was it over or under a million words?
1,032,019 Words
That’s an interesting author group to be in! If you count my academic research papers related to Lean management and most of my 700+ blog posts, the word count probably approaches two million words.
Here’s what a million words looks like, measured in inches.
I never set out to write 28 books. It just happened. I found progressive management, and later, classical management and their associated leadership routines so interesting that it captured my curiosity. So I just had to study it, obsessively I will admit, because I was eager to learn as much as I could as fast as I could.
There is still more to learn, and I continue to do that because I cannot extinguish my curiosity — nor do I want to. Future learnings will show up in presentations, social media posts, videos, podcasts, and conversations.
Given all my writing and publishing experience, you might be interested in my tips for book writing and publishing. Click here to view the blog post. And this post about what surprised me the most in doing this work.
Lastly, here is a 60-second video that will help you understand what each books is about (15 pages).