I think there’s a lot of people out there who don’t pay much attention to word counts. They can look at a 300 page book and guess how long it will take them to read—it’s physical and measurable—but ask them how long it’ll take to read a 90,000 word novel and they’ll look at you like you have an octopus tentacle for a nose.
Before I began writing, I was the same way … word count, schmerd count, didn’t matter to me.
With the advent of ebooks, propagation of word count has grown. As if this one metric explains everything. Yeah, I know Kindle recently added page numbers. Still what does that mean? There’s more pages holding an ereader horizontally than there are when holding it vertically. Page count on an iPad is much different than an on an iPhone.
To combat this problem I’ve always put an estimated reading time with my stories.
The only problem is, I’ve been using the BBC spoken word standard of 10,000 words per hour, or 166 words per minute (WPM). People read faster than that. The interwebs give a variety of statistics on how fast people read, but I’ve narrowed it down to a range: 250-300 words per minute. I get this figure both from WolframAlpha and WikiPedia.
So how does that map out to a 5,000 word short story:
BBC Spoken Word: 30 minutes
At 250 words per minute: 25 minutes
At 300 words per minute: 16 minutes 40 seconds
Still, I don’t believe that range. Readers typically read a lot. Most of them are on the high end the bell curve, reading prose faster than average. So, I’m bumping the high end of my range to 350 words per minute.
Now, to go back and relabel my stories with a more accurate reading time.
(A 5,000 word story, using the 250-350 wpm range takes 14 – 25 minutes.)