swingerjoe
Experienced
- Joined
- Dec 19, 2013
- Posts
- 94
As a Lit reader, I prefer short stories, as I don't always have the time to read a lengthy one. Because of that, I tend to shy away from stories that are longer than three pages. But I also find that I shy away from stories that are titled as "Chapter 9" or even "Chapter 5", because I don't want to start reading in the middle of a story, and finding the beginning requires navigating to the author's page and searching for that series, which can often be a daunting task.
So...I've conducted a bit of an experiment. I used the multi-chapter format for one of my stories, and then broke up my next story into a "trilogy" format, where the names of the stories were similar, but not entirely the same.
What I have noticed, so far, is that when I broke up my stories into multiple chapters and labeled them as such, I had over 22,000 hits for Chapter One, and then that number nearly consistently declined from 17,000 to 10,000 to 7,000, and then spiking to 9,500 in the final chapter.
When I broke up my story into a "trilogy" format, I had roughly 18,900 hits in the first part of the trilogy, and over 19,000 in the second. I actually managed to GAIN readers.
I realize that other factors are at play here: the content/quality of the story itself, the time since the story has been published, the day of the week when the story is published, etc.. But it seems clear to me that readers prefer the "trilogy" method of breaking up a story rather than the "chapter" method.
My next experiment will be to post one long story, and see how that affects the number of views.
Any thoughts on this? Has anyone tried a similar experiment?
So...I've conducted a bit of an experiment. I used the multi-chapter format for one of my stories, and then broke up my next story into a "trilogy" format, where the names of the stories were similar, but not entirely the same.
What I have noticed, so far, is that when I broke up my stories into multiple chapters and labeled them as such, I had over 22,000 hits for Chapter One, and then that number nearly consistently declined from 17,000 to 10,000 to 7,000, and then spiking to 9,500 in the final chapter.
When I broke up my story into a "trilogy" format, I had roughly 18,900 hits in the first part of the trilogy, and over 19,000 in the second. I actually managed to GAIN readers.
I realize that other factors are at play here: the content/quality of the story itself, the time since the story has been published, the day of the week when the story is published, etc.. But it seems clear to me that readers prefer the "trilogy" method of breaking up a story rather than the "chapter" method.
My next experiment will be to post one long story, and see how that affects the number of views.
Any thoughts on this? Has anyone tried a similar experiment?