Multi-chapter vs. one lengthy story

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?

Awesome insight here and helpful since I am trying to sort that situation out myself. I have a lot of material and I have put it together in different ways just so I could see what I liked best and what was more practical for posting. I am one of those people that spend ages on decisions like this and try and take the best option (very OCD in that regard) for the best possible outcome. Though I plan on posting a single story first that has no chapters or anything. Just to see what people think of what I write and all. That will help set the stage for what to do next.

I'm wrestling with this myself. I had a story in mind, with basically three different sections. I posted the first as "Chapter 1", then wrote the second. Then when chapter 1 was accepted and posted, I started getting comments that it was too short, and that it should be one long story. They were probably right that the first one at least was too short. I finished, in my mind, the story with chapter 3, but I didn't label it "the end", so some comments are saying things like they want to see where it goes from here, etc.

So if I want to have a continuing series with the same characters, but not necessarily as chapters, which implies a more cohesive story line, how should they be labeled? Similar titles? Something like "Another story in the Sandy series?"

swingerjoe said:

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.

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?

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if the story is of one timeline and its going long, i wud prefer breaking it up as the reader is curious to know whts coming up next...

A single long submission will typically result in lower views and less feedback.

The upside is that anyone who doesn't run for the hills upon seeing the page numbers at the bottom and ends up finishing is much more likely to give you a good score.

There are some people who won't read chaptered stories as well. There are too many that aren't complete, and they've reached the point where they don't even start one anymore because they expect it to drop off without an ending.

From a pure tactical standpoint, the odds lean toward going with chapters. ( so long as the story is complete, the chapters cross over to at least a second Lit page, and you post them between 3 to 7 days apart max to completion )

Every time a chapter posts, your author name gets out there. Every time a chapter posts, you have a chance of staying on your category hub's "new stories" list for a little extra time, and of appearing in other sections of the category hub. It gets you a great deal more exposure to potential new readers than the single flash in a pan you get from a long submission.

You also have the opportunity to create anticipation that can keep your readers engaged. Just have to walk the line between anticipation and irritation by posting on a regular schedule.

There are always exceptions to the rule, though. There are a lot of long ( even ridiculously long, as in 30 Lit pages ) stories that are at the top of the toplists with mountains of favorites and other feedback. If your story is that good, word gets around.

swingerjoe said:

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.

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Here's the thing: Let's call the number of people who read the first story X. Of X, some will like it and some will not. So when you post Chapter 2, the number of people who read it will inevitably be smaller than X, because those who didn't like the first one are very unlikely to come back for another round. Even if it's a very popular story, you'll almost never see future chapters get more than X, because that would mean pleasing everyone.

This is why I generally regard sequels as a poor investment of time, except under certain highly unusual circumstances: You're automatically going to lose some portion of the potential audience without even a day in court. With a long story, eh, at least they're equally as likely to click on it. Besides, I find that chapter breaks really ruin the momentum. You know that habit filmmakers have today of taking one big book and shooting it as two movies? You notice how the first of those movies is usually inferior to its own sequel and usually ends on a lame, awkward note? That's because stories aren't usually meant to be told in half-sized chunks. "Story" is something of a whole unit to itself. Sometimes this piecemeal approach can work...but I think it's rare, and probably more trouble than it's worth even then.

On top of that, I personally have a kind of pet peeve about the story lists always being cluttered up with "Part 3" and "Chapter 11" of this or that. But a lot of folks seem to enjoy such lengthy series, so I suppose there must be something to say for them.

I like chapter/series stories if they're well-written with a good plot. (They're also easier and more enjoyable to edit, to me anyway).

If they are novel length, there's a good reason to do them in chapters. A reader isn't going to be able to read them in one setting. But they aren't likely to remember where they left off coming back to a thirty-Lit. page single entry. Some here also have stated that they don't even begin to read something that has over X number of pages. I have to really want to read something that's over three Lit. pages or I won't bother. Three Lit. pages already is probably going to take more time than I have to give to reading a story just then.

Sequels and chapters aren't the same thing, by the way.

IRL short stories can be any length but generally run 10-15 printed pages, ditto chapters of a novel. My idea of Hell is a story that goes more than one LIT page, two if its excellent.

TamLin01 said:

Here's the thing: Let's call the number of people who read the first story X. Of X, some will like it and some will not. So when you post Chapter 2, the number of people who read it will inevitably be smaller than X, because those who didn't like the first one are very unlikely to come back for another round. Even if it's a very popular story, you'll almost never see future chapters get more than X, because that would mean pleasing everyone.

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For what it's worth, I started keeping track of view counts about halfway through a 14-chapter story. I've attached a graph below: green = chapter 1, through yellow, orange, red, purple, to blue for chapter 14.

From the graph you can see that, yeah, chapter 1 has a lot more views than chapter 2, which has a lot more than chapter 3. Some of that is just because the older ones have been out longer; I was going about 5 weeks between updates, and a chapter will build up about 1000-1500 views in that time. After correcting for that, Chapter 1 has about 50% more views than the later chapters, and by Chapter 3 it's pretty much flattened out. Most of the remaining variation has to do with placement on the New Stories page - chapter 10 went out during a quiet spell and stayed near the top of the front page for almost a day, chapter 11 got buried under a ton of contest entrants.

But what you can also see is that people aren't just coming to the story via chapter 1. Every time I posted a new chapter, all the previous chapters got a bump - it doesn't look huge on the graph, but over all those chapters it adds up. For instance, chapter 14 picked up about 4500 views in its first seven days, but it also bumped the other chapters up by about 5000 views total.

For me, the length and type of story will determine whether it will be one part or multiple parts.
Really long, single posted stories are very difficult to pull off, unless you are an author with a large and loyal following. Let's face it. Most people come to this site for one reason, and that isn't to critique the editing and writing skills of another person.

I think it's easier to get away with a longer story if it is filled with numerous sex scenes that escalate in nature. That kind of story will allow a reader to, let's say, pace themselves, building tension until a final release late in the story. Waiting for another chapter can be a downer in such a case.

I like to keep my stories to two lit pages, three at most. Of course, sometimes a longer story needs to be told, and I prefer to do those is multiple parts, even though the later parts typically get less views than the earlier ones. In my multipart stories, I do make sure I include sex in each chapter. On a site like this, I don't want to post a chapter that is completely devoid of sex, which is kind of the reason people are here.

After posting my last story, I realized that it's better to make a story longer than to leave out or gloss over something important. I had a main character that went back to her husband after he had accused her of infidelity and divorced her. I totally glossed it over in one sentence in an attempt to keep the story to a more manageable length. I was correctly called out for that in the comments section.

I had to deal with this question also. Well, mostly it seemed like stories broken up into chapters was the common thing to do, but I also noticed some postings with multiple chapters in one posting. I had the entire story finished before I posted anything, so I could pretty much do it however I wanted. In the end I did post each chapter separately, it just seemed more natural.

swingerjoe said:

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.

Click to expand...

I noticed a similar pattern.

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.

Click to expand...

In your trilogy story, is each part able to stand alone? As you pointed out, sometimes when you find yourself in the middle of a story, you have to drop back to the author's page and find the beginning.

Darkniciad said:

From a pure tactical standpoint, the odds lean toward going with chapters. ( so long as the story is complete, the chapters cross over to at least a second Lit page, and you post them between 3 to 7 days apart max to completion )

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Right, I posted mine about a week apart (varying depending on the review delay). I figured it's fun to publish something in a serialized fashion, so that early readers have to wait in between each chapter, but not for long. Once the whole thing is up, the difference between being posted in chapters or one large posting is largely semantics, or at least it should be.

A bunch of my chapters did come in on only one Lit page, and people did complain. To be fair, none of them were less than a page in my word processor, it didn't seem like a big deal and I wasn't particularly trying to be long-winded. I should say lesson learned, but really, don't cause yourself any trouble just to avoid some whiners.

Every time a chapter posts, your author name gets out there. Every time a chapter posts, you have a chance of staying on your category hub's "new stories" list for a little extra time, and of appearing in other sections of the category hub. It gets you a great deal more exposure to potential new readers than the single flash in a pan you get from a long submission.

You also have the opportunity to create anticipation that can keep your readers engaged. Just have to walk the line between anticipation and irritation by posting on a regular schedule.

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My thoughts exactly.

sr71plt said:

If they are novel length, there's a good reason to do them in chapters. A reader isn't going to be able to read them in one setting. But they aren't likely to remember where they left off coming back to a thirty-Lit. page single entry.

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I'm also on board with this line of thinking

Swilly said:

In my multipart stories, I do make sure I include sex in each chapter.

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I very specifically did this. One sex scene per chapter, plus whatever plot bits lead into the sex or result from the sex. It does vary a little, some chapters have kind of one and a half scenes. One chapter joins a sex scene with totally unrelated plot scene, but chronologically they occurred around the same time so it made sense to drop them into a chapter together. Another chapter is a sex scene that required essentially no supporting plot but really didn't belong dropped into any of the other chapters, so it stands alone and yes, is the shortest chapter.

This thread is very helpful. I'm working on my first submission to the site now, and I think I read somewhere at a single Lit page is about 3700 words? I'm at about 26K words now and probably 2/3 of the way done with the story, so it looks like even now I'm at about 7 Lit pages, and I'm seeing a lot of people saying they won't even bother if they see a story is that long.

Now I'm reconsidering releasing it in chapters once I've finished with it. My only concern is that the resolution of the story may take too long without any sex in it, and if that part is all in one last chapter... But maybe people won't bother reading a last chapter anyway if they're not interested in the story arc to begin with.

It's always a tricky thing - just because I like it, doesn't mean other people will.

I seem to be in the minority - Provided the story is well written, I always prefer to read a single entry even if it's super long than wade around through chapters.

Darkniciad said:

Every time a chapter posts, your author name gets out there. Every time a chapter posts, you have a chance of staying on your category hub's "new stories" list for a little extra time, and of appearing in other sections of the category hub. It gets you a great deal more exposure to potential new readers than the single flash in a pan you get from a long submission.

You also have the opportunity to create anticipation that can keep your readers engaged. Just have to walk the line between anticipation and irritation by posting on a regular schedule.

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Probably the most important words in the entire thread when it comes to posting a series. Once you have developed a fan base with an ongoing story, the worst thing you can do is suddenly become lackadaisical in posting on a dependable schedule.

I'm getting ready to submit chapter 14 of a series that will eventually go well past 20 chapters in total, and I have been religious about making sure a new one hits every 6 to 8 days to keep the fans happy and reading.

I wrote all of my stories in sequence, yet self-contained and they were going to have different titles. Then, I decided on the chapter format and kind of wish that I didn't due to the dropoff effect after ch01. The up side is that the people who really liked ch01 hung around and that led to higher ratings. It seems like no chapters = higher views, with chapters = higher ratings.