I frequently hire freelance writers to write e-books and other information products for my small online publishing business.

Recently RH, a potential author, was taken aback when I told him I wanted a 15,000-word e-book from him.

“How did you come up with 15,000 words as the desired length?” he asked me, hinting that it was unwise of me to demand such a huge number of words.

“In this age of hyper-information overloading, shouldn’t a document be more like the lady’s skirt—short enough to be interesting and just long enough to cover the subject?” he suggested.

RH’s question seems sensible enough on the surface.

But his conclusion that when it comes to writing and reading shorter is universally preferable to longer is not true.

May I explain why?

To begin with, RH is theoretically correct when he suggests that readers are busy, have too much to read, and not enough time to read it.

Despite this, however, people who buy information products—especially online—have a slightly different perspective than ordinary readers.

Info-products buyers do, to some extent, buy their information “buy the pound”.

If they pay a high price, they expect a lot for their money. Not just great content. But plenty of it.

We call this demand for quantity the “thud” factor. When a customer orders a $50 info-product, the material should make a nice “thud” when he drops it on his desk.

For e-books selling in the $19 to $49 range, I find that the customer is satisfied with a thicker, heftier e-book—at least 50 pages—when he prints it out and holds it in his hands.

With approximately 300 words per page, a 50-page e-book is 15,000 words, which is the word count requirement I gave RH.

RH, in turn, suggested that we could make a more valuable product by covering the topic in a single page, which he said he could do.

Well, let me warn you now. If you sell a $29 e-book, and deliver to your customers a one-page PDF document on the topic, your refund rate will be huge.

Those customers will feel ripped off and not buy from you again.

Even if that one page has great content, it is not enough. It does not meet the “thud factor” requirement.

The reason for RH’s erroneous assumptions on word length is that he is applying the same rule of modern writing—that brevity is the chief virtue of good writing—equally to information the reader wants as well as information he doesn’t want.

I agree with RH that in correspondence and other documents the prospect doesn’t really want or care about, you want to get to the point as quickly as possible—and keep it short and simple.

But when you sell a customer an e-book or special report, you are sending him writing that he actually wants to read.

Remember, he ordered it. He even paid you for it. He didn’t have to buy. But he did.

That means your customer is sufficiently interested in the topic to educate himself on it at his own expense.

He is reading your e-book for his own benefit. And perhaps for his own enjoyment. It is not a chore. Or if it is a chore, it is one he has volunteered for.

Strangely, RH didn’t complain to me that books he buys on Amazon.com or in Barnes & Noble have “too many words”.

Yet the average 200-page non-fiction trade paperback book contains 80,000 words—5 times the length of my average e-book!

Are you, like RH, afraid your copy—whether you are writing a salesletter, a landing page, an article, a special report, or a print or electronic book—is too long?

If so, the reason might be any of the following defects…all of which can and should be corrected:

1. Too much fluff: to meet the required word length, you have padded your copy, making it dull and flabby. You are wasting the reader’s time saying the same thing over and over in different ways.

2. Lack of content: you haven’t done your homework, so you don’t have a rich body of facts to illustrate your points and support your claims. Given the existence of the Internet and Google, there is no excuse for such inadequate research.

3. Lack of authority: you sound like you don’t really understand your subject in depth, and the reason is you probably don’t. You need to either become an expert or interview an expert (or two).

4. Boring copy: you don’t really care about the topic or the project, and it comes across in your copy. Solution: write only on subjects you are interested in and care about.

Bob Bly is the author of “World’s Best Copywriting Secrets” and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him “America’s top copywriter”.