How long does it take to read 400 pages?
A long novel. Most contemporary fantasy starts around here, and so do most of the literary hardbacks people mean by a serious read.
7h 20m
110,000 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 2 weeks.
That is 15 sessions with 400 pages.
Read it with the Guild45 minutes a day would finish it in about 10 days.
How many words is 400 pages?
400 pages is about 110,000 words, at the trade-paperback average of 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 7 hours 20 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 400-page hardback and a 400-page mass-market paperback are not the same read. Treat this as a good estimate, not a count.
- Slower (150 wpm)
- 12 hours 13 minutes
- Average (250 wpm)
- 7 hours 20 minutes
- Faster (400 wpm)
- 4 hours 35 minutes
What 400 pages a day gets you
400 pages a day is about 7 hours 20 minutes of reading. Keep it up and an average 300-page novel takes 1 day. Here is what that looks like against books people are actually timing.
Books that are about 400 pages
From our catalog, between 360 and 440 pages.
Knowing the number is the easy part.
400 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