Track Word Count

How do you know what's worth reading if you haven't already read it? You can go off the author's previous work, others' opinions, or just sample randomly, but there's still the question of how high the bar needs to be before you start and stop.

Eventually, it comes down to time. How much time are you willing to waste on unknown writing in order to find something worth reading?

But for some reason the standard measures of time are terrible.

Whenever I see an article which takes "x minutes" to read, I halve it. I read fast, estimates assume you read slow, and it's going to be wrong anyway so there's really no point in trying to make a more precise correction.

As for books, I don't even pay attention to page count anymore. Adjusting page count for book size, font size, and margins is too much thinking. People use pages because it's an obvious metric and consistent within a book, not because it's a good one.

For English text, word count is the most reliable metric for length.

It's still wrong for measuring time because it doesn't account for overall organization, sentence complexity, breadth of vocabulary, or style. I couldn't even begin to explain how useless it is for evaluating quality.

But it's better than nothing.

It's the best attempt I have to answer the question "How much does this author want to show me?" before starting, so I can mentally brace accordingly. You cannot approach a short story with the same mental frame as a novel, and word count will tell you that.

Checking Word Count

Switching to new measurements is hard, so here's a few easy reference points.

• These posts average around 700 words, peaking at 1400.¹
• Normal traditionally published books are somewhere between 50k-150k, depending on genre and style. Search for the word count of popular books in your preferred genre for a better reference point.
• The full seven book Harry Potter series is about 1m words.²

Some books have listed official or reader reported counts online. For traditional books there are some estimators which primarily calculate based on page count. Not the most accurate, but they get the right order of magnitude.

If it's something digital, you can copy paste into any word processor to check. It'll probably include some garbage like page footers, but it shouldn't be enough to matter.

I've been using a script for estimating wordcount of .epub files, there's similar online tools for other formats.

Checking Your Speed

If you want to know how long something will take you personally, you need to know your reading speed.

Average reading speed is around 300 wpm. You can take a random online test if you want, but most people don't read that way normally. I recommend picking a long short story and reading it normally, noting down when you start and finish, then dividing the time by the word count.

If you don't read fiction, pick anything in the same length range (5-15k) of your preferred category. Make sure it's something you haven't read before. Speed goes up on something you've already read, even if you think you've forgotten it.

Now what?

You can calculate how long it'll take before you start, and therefore how big a commitment something is.

For quick reference it's easier to multiply how long it takes to read 1k words instead of dividing by wpm. For example, if you read at around 300 wpm (~3 minutes for 1k words) and want to finish a 100k novel, that's about 300 minutes = 5 hours.

Here's the intuition I use when starting something:

• <1k: Basically free. I'll read almost anything of this length which looks interesting.
• 1k: "Toilet reading". Doesn't take long, but does require actual reading. Might have good ideas, won't get into them.
• 5k: A short story or a chunky blog post. I should check the clock before starting, but I don't need to during. This is where things start being memorable.
• 10k: Reading is now the main activity I'm doing, not a break from something else.
• 20k: The lower bound of traditional books. Finishing something is a proper decision with trade-offs, or I've tripped into a really long blog post again. Either way, it's a commitment, so it better be good.
• 50k: The ceiling for what I'll reread on a whim. If it was this long and nothing stuck with me, I'm never coming back.
• 100k: A solid novel. Still doable in a single session, but check the calendar first. Books have space to dig into their ideas from many angles.
• 250k: The peak of traditionally published books. Barely finishable in a day, but only if it's the main thing I'm doing that day. I won't finish it if I don't trust the author.
• 1m+: Committing to reading this will devour my life for a week, or more realistically seep into free time for a month. I can count this category on one hand, maybe two.

Your thresholds will differ, but you won't know by how much till you start counting.

Happy reading,

- Rew

Nightly Notes

The irony that I write at a length I consider trivial to read is not lost on me. I still treat writing and reading word counts as unrelated numbers.

Maybe I haven't written enough yet to merge them.

It's non trivial to have written them for me at least.

...

There's a more depressing version of yesterday's post called "Cripplingly Human" which is about how we cannot escape the physical restrictions of our body. We have reaction speeds, we take time to learn things, we have things we are naturally³ worse at. You can work around them, but you can't force your way past those restrictions, and it feels bad. I was forcibly reminded of that fact after writing it, for entirely unrelated reasons.

Luckily they don't matter most of the time, because outside of competitive sports or academics, most people aren't going to bang against that cap over and over.

I'm glad I was thinking about it from the positive side before that happened. Or rather, I'm glad I didn't have the chance to write other version.

Not today at least.

- Rew