How Long More Should Your Business Booklet Be?

A great question about booklet printing that a lot of people struggle with is its length. Since booklets are not “books” per se, and books themselves vary and length, the rules for the length of booklet printing can be vary vague and often confusing. So lots of people ask, how long should my business booklets be?
Well, the simple answer to that question is basically answered by the booklet's ultimate purpose and use. In this article, I will tell you a few tips on the proper lengths and printing strategies of the different types of booklets. Hopefully this should give you a general idea of how your own booklet printing will play out.
Product booklets – For product booklets that advertise single, or related types of products, the general rule in length for booklets is that “the shorter it is the better”. Since product booklets are advertising booklets, you must keep in mind the attention span of the casual reader. In most cases this attention span is pretty short, and only goes for a few moments before getting bored, especially on booklets. So a product booklet for a car or gadget for example, should only go for about 5-10 pages long if at all possible. This should satisfy the need to display the information and specifications of the product, without getting too boring with the details. Aim for this length and you should be fine.
Public Relations booklets – For public relation booklets that describe a company or firm, the recommended length for the booklet is just around 4-8 pages long. Yes, it should even be shorter than advertising or product booklets since people have less patience with P.R. Booklets. Unless they are a reporter who needs to research, P.R. Booklets will usually be aimed for a more targeted audience of business partners and investors. So it pays to keep these kinds of booklets short and sweet to deliver the important information as good and as quickly as you can. Otherwise, those partners and investors will get bored with too much company puffery.
Training booklets – For training booklets, the rule is very simple. Booklets of this type basically should be as long as it should have to be to provide proper training. Of course, care must be taken in it being created too long. Anything beyond 30 or 50 pages and you'll have more of a book than a simple training booklet. But more or less, your training booklets should contain everything a person needs to learn the topic at hand. It just requires a little concise writing and clever images to make things shorter and easier to read.
Catalog booklets – For catalog booklets that display a number of product images, the best length should be around 8-16 pages depending on the amount of products you want to display. Anything more than 20 pages and you risk losing people to “product overload”. You can try to print multiple short catalog booklets of categorized products instead of one big one, if you want to avoid “product overload”. The shorter your catalog booklets are the better they will be understood and received.