Long chapters can be informative, but they can also drag or be too crammed with information and lose the reader’s attention. You can fight that with short chapters that keep the reader’s atten- tion and maintain a fast pace, but that can also be confusing to the reader. If you’d like some guidelines, you can assume that the average non- fiction book is 50k words, and that they have 12 chapters, so around 4k words would be an “average” chapter length. That number actu- ally lines up pretty well with the data we have on this, but again, that number should neither be a goal, nor a constraint. It’s just a convention. Chapters can be 500 words, or even 10k. It all depends on how much you dive into an idea and how far you go with that idea. IS THERE A MAXIMUM OR MINIMUM LENGTH FOR A CHAPTER? No. A chapter is a single argument, idea, or step in your process. That can be as long or as short as is necessary. The only word of caution is to consider that if the chapter is under 1,000 words, it may not be a whole idea or chapter and may be part of something else. And if it is more than 10k words, it may be two or more chapters. IS IT OK IF CHAPTERS ARE DIFFERENT LENGTHS? Of course it is. If one chapter is 5,000 words, and then 1,200, and then 3,000, and then 1,000, that is all fine. In fact, it might be beneficial. Varying the flow can make the book read better, depending on what you are saying. 428 · ThE SCriBE METhOD