“I feel like I’m in a kind of no-man’s land so my plan is to just focus on keeping accumulating new words until I pass through. Every now and then I re-open a book to see how things are progressing.”-debbielim
I feel the same here. I check from time to time on a German book at the library to see my progress, if I can understand at least a nice 50%.
Some people can handle reading very difficult things, but most people need a fairly high level of comprehension to feel comfortable. So the trick is to find interesting material that you can understand. This is easier for some languages than for others. If you enjoy kids books, that’s a bonus. If you don’t mind reading graded readers, that’s a bonus.
@OzzyHellBack - if/when you can understand about 50% is that when you would try to read the book?
I’ve pretty much abandoned paying too much attention to my known words count on LingQ. If I recognise a word that’s in a declined/conjugated form then I don’t change it to known. Or if it’s a cognate. So it may take me a decade to get to 12,000+ words! I think what I’d like to do when I start reading novels though is find one’s with lots of natural dialogue. I guess they may use less varied vocabulary but I figure there’s the added benefit of learning natural phrases that you can actually use.
If you want a lot of dialogues (actually only dialogues 
you can try to read subtitles of TV Shows or movies that you know (you can find German subtitles at http://www.subcentral.de or http://subscene.com/).
Here is an instruction how to change srt file to normal text without time-stamps: Strip Timecode from .SRT file Free on Mac - YouTube
You can watch in English with German subtitles. Or you can import subtitles in LinQ. Or you can create parallel texts (e.g. German-English).
You will instantly see how German person would say some English phrases, what words he would chose, because subtitles are made by natives for natives. And German (unlike English) has (almost) fixed pronunciation so you will be able to say the read phrase without ever hearing it.
@jviktors - thanks so much for this - it never occurred to me that I could access dialogues this way! I will definitely check it out and hope my tech skills are sufficient