Write a GREAT Book! 61 Many new writers don’t know how many words will be in their book. 吀栀ey think in terms of pages. 吀栀ey say, “Oh, my book is about two hundred pages long.” If you say something like that, you immediately tag yourself as an amateur. Depending on how a book is formatted, a 30,000- word document can be the same size as one that is 50,000 words long. 吀栀e massive best seller Who Moved My Cheese? is only 8,000 words long, but the dimensions of the book are identical to a book with a much higher word count. Generally speaking, publishers expect a non- 昀椀ction manuscript to be between somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 words. Some very successful books are much shorter—Deepak Chopra’s 吀栀e Seven Spiritual Laws of Success is another example—but a new writer needs to provide something more substantial in terms of word count. 吀栀e page count comes much later in the process. Back Up the Files! Writing a book is both a conscious and an unconscious process. Simply put, there’s a lot of spooky stu昀昀 going on. If you’re really putting your heart onto the page as you should, there will be a certain amount of inner resis- tance to the process. 吀栀at resistance can surface in lots of unexpected ways. Plus, lots of other unexpected things