If you keep a particularly tight budget, or simply like getting your money’s worth out of books, then you probably shop around for the ones that are a bit thicker than others. Personally, I don’t consider length too much of a problem unless a novel is incredibly short or stupidly long.
Me aside, here is a quick post to help you consider some aspects when buying new novels based on their length, or at least allowing their length to be a major consideration in your purchasing process.
A Page per Minute
Even if you’re a fast reader, it’s unlikely that you’ll burn through pages at blistering speeds. We read pages with lost of back and forth dialogue the quickest, mainly because those have few words than a page full of paragraphs with minimal line breaks.
The easiest way to roughly gauge how long you’re going to be reading a book is to look at the page count and convert it into minutes. Using this method, you can estimate that a two-hundred-page novel will take just over three hours of reading time; a three-hundred-page one around five hours; and around ten hours for books at the six hundred or higher mark.
If a bookshop is selling two books for the same price, and one is ~150 pages long and the other ~300 pages, that’s the difference of two and a half hours. If those books cost £10 each, the shorter one works out to £4 per hour, whereas the longer one halves that to £2 per hour.
Sustaining Your Attention
If you lean towards longer books, you have to be the sort that can maintain an interest in a lengthy and well-explored narrative, usually across multiple reading sessions. Readers like myself tend to stay away from anything that strays too close to the 400+ page counts, simply because we can’t stay invested for six or seven hours across multiple days.
If you’re the same, then picking out hefty reads is not an ideal thing to be doing, even if you seem to be getting more value for money. Always consider your enjoyment of a book over the idea of being economical, a few pounds or dollars isn’t going to massively change your life during a one-off purchase. Won’t it feel like a waste if you have to force yourself to finish it after growing bored? In events like that, you would have been better off picking a short title that you got out of the way in a couple of days.
So, whilst it’s good not to be spending silly amounts of money on short novels and even shorter novellas that only last a few hours, indulging in more compact literature is sometimes necessary in order to avoid burnout.
Stick to Long-Winded Authors
Some authors never put out a short book, they’re always dishing out titles whose thickness can easily be measured in inches.
If you find a few authors that are like this, and whose work you always seem to enjoy, then try to buy up each of their works as time goes on. There’s a high likelihood that their novels will entertain you, whilst also being suitably lengthy, and it’s your best short-term solution to reliably buying longer books that you feel confident will appeal to you.
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