How long does it take to read 200 pages?
A slim novel. Under the average, and genuinely finishable across a weekend.
3h 40m
55,000 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 8 days.
That is 7 sessions with 200 pages.
Read it with the Guild45 minutes a day would finish it in about 5 days.
How many words is 200 pages?
200 pages is about 55,000 words, at the trade-paperback average of 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 3 hours 40 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 200-page hardback and a 200-page mass-market paperback are not the same read. Treat this as a good estimate, not a count.
- Slower (150 wpm)
- 6 hours 7 minutes
- Average (250 wpm)
- 3 hours 40 minutes
- Faster (400 wpm)
- 2 hours 18 minutes
What 200 pages a day gets you
200 pages a day is about 3 hours 40 minutes of reading. Keep it up and an average 300-page novel takes 2 days. Here is what that looks like against books people are actually timing.
Books that are about 200 pages
From our catalog, between 180 and 220 pages.
Knowing the number is the easy part.
200 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