Grief & Loss: word count & book length

Books that walk with readers through bereavement — memoirs of loss, guided journals and gentle companions for the first year. Shorter, warmer books often serve grieving readers best.

• Consider a slightly larger type size: grieving readers often report difficulty concentrating.
• Include a resources page with helplines appropriate to your market.
• See our guide to writing about grief and loss.

Grief is the response to the loss of something deemed important, in particular the death of a person or animal to which a bond or affection was formed. Although conventionally focused on the emotional response to loss, grief also has physical, cognitive, behavioral, social, cultural, spiritual, political and philosophical dimensions. While the terms are often used interchangeably, bereavement refers to the state of loss, while grief is the reaction to that loss. The grief associated with death is familiar to most people, but individuals grieve in connection with a variety of losses throughout their lives, such as unemployment, ill health or the end of a relationship.

From the Wikipedia article “Grief”, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.