Pages Per Day, Books Per Year: Change Your Reading Metrics To Read More

As a country, we love ourselves some goals. The bigger the goal, the better. The scarier, the more significant it seems.

Who among us hasn’t signed up for a marathon, shouting into an empty room with excitement?

Who among us hasn’t thought about buying a house, fudging those loan prediction calculators beyond recognition?

Who among us hasn’t gotten a Goodreads email about their yearly book reading challenge, and said “52 books seems reasonable!”

For all the big, exciting goals we’re passionate about setting, we also know we need a corresponding plan in place to achieve them.

Marathons don’t run themselves.

Houses don’t buy themselves.

And books don’t read themselves.

Still, plans to get to the finish line of any major goal can feel daunting. Breaking those plans down into smaller goals can help to give you a little more motivation along the way.

That’s why marathoners tend to schedule smaller races, like 10ks and half-marathons, on the way up to their big day.

That’s why house payments (normally) consist of a down payment and loans.

But for books, we can get stuck on the number of books read. Today, let’s take a look at how else you can think about your regular reading to make getting to your milestone goals easier.

Different Ways To Measure Your Reading

Let’s pick a nice round number for our yearly reading goal. We’ll call it 12 books - the national average. Already, you can see it as a book per month. So what other ways can you break down your reading to get to your goal?

• Pages per day - While not easy to figure out the average pages per book (fiction could be approaching 400 pages while non-fiction is around 270), we’ll take an average of 330 pages per book. That means to finish your 12 average-length books, you’ll need to read a whopping 10 pages per day. That seems pretty doable, doesn’t it?
  
  
• Chapters per week - Another difficult to quantify average, chapters have the perk of feeling like mini-accomplishments within a book. It’s where one idea ends and the next one begins. With an average of 12 chapters in non-fiction books as well as fiction books (though plenty of examples that break those rules), you could set out to divide your reading time to 3 chapters a week to hit your goal.
  
  
• Chunks of time - Say you don’t have time every day or even every week to read. Calculating pages per day or chapters per week might be tough. Instead, you could block out your chunks of time. Time yourself for an hour and see how far you get (the average reader hits about 40 pages per hour). That gives you a per-book rate of about 8.25 hours. Drop these blocks in your calendar and get your reading on!

However you go about your reading, we hope you recognize it’s a real accomplishment, and one you can celebrate with your own IRLA Pack dedicated to reading achievements.

And we’d love to know what your reading goals are for the year. Have you come close to hitting them? Skyrocketed past them? Leave us a comment!