How long does it take to read 20 pages?
A short story, or a single chapter of a long novel.
22m
5,500 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about a day.
That is 1 session with 20 pages.
Read it with the GuildHow many words is 20 pages?
20 pages is about 5,500 words, at the trade-paperback average of 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 22 minutes.
Most reading-time sites default to 300 words a minute. The best evidence we could find, a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies by Marc Brysbaert, puts silent adult reading of English prose closer to 238 words a minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. We use 250. It is slower than the number you will see elsewhere, and it is closer to how people actually read.
Page counts are the softer half of this. Font size, trim size and how much of a book is dialogue all move words-per-page around, so a 20-page hardback and a 20-page mass-market paperback are not the same read. Treat this as a good estimate, not a count.
- Slower (150 wpm)
- 37 minutes
- Average (250 wpm)
- 22 minutes
- Faster (400 wpm)
- 14 minutes
What 20 pages a day gets you
20 pages a day is about 22 minutes of reading. Keep it up and an average 300-page novel takes 15 days. Here is what that looks like against books people are actually timing.
Knowing the number is the easy part.
20 pages a day is a plan. Keeping it is the hard part, and it is easier with company. ReadersGuild opens soon, and it is where people read alongside each other, one session at a time.
Join the waitlist