Pacing is a promise, not a speed

When a reader says a book drags, they rarely mean the sentences got slower. They mean they stopped believing that anything they were reading would pay off. Pacing is the management of expectation, and expectation is set long before the section that appears to fail.

This is why cutting the sagging middle so often makes a manuscript worse. The middle is where the promise made in the opening comes due. If the opening promised a marriage in trouble and the middle delivers a subplot about a business, the fault is upstream.

The practical test: for every chapter, write one sentence naming what the reader is waiting to find out. If three consecutive chapters produce the same sentence, you have found your problem — and it is a question of stakes, not of word count.