A Question About Submissions

No, not submission, submissions.

I am a new author here, and I've been working on a story that's gotten quite long (over 7,000 words). and I haven't been able to find this elsewhere, so I hope I'm asking in the right place.

If I submit a long story, should I split it into chapters? Or is that done after a story is submitted?

Also, I intend to leave the story open, so it can be added to later. How would that be handled? How would I make sure that a second submission is connected to the first?

Thanks!

I'll just say that 7,000 words isn't long for Literotica. It's just two Lit. pages.

Ah, all right. That's something else I hadn't figured out yet, how o\long is a full page on Lit.

Thanks.

Any takers on my second question?

The only way to make sure that two stories are connected as the system stands right now is to give them the same title plus Ch. 02, Pt. 02, or something similar.

There isn't a way to link stories that belong to the same series or timeline but are otherwise self-contained as individual tales as of yet. It's supposed to be in the works.

Eschiava said:

Ah, all right. That's something else I hadn't figured out yet, how o\long is a full page on Lit.

Thanks.

Any takers on my second question?

Click to expand...

Eschiava said:

No, not submission, submissions.

I am a new author here, and I've been working on a story that's gotten quite long (over 7,000 words). and I haven't been able to find this elsewhere, so I hope I'm asking in the right place.

If I submit a long story, should I split it into chapters? Or is that done after a story is submitted?

Also, I intend to leave the story open, so it can be added to later. How would that be handled? How would I make sure that a second submission is connected to the first?

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Hi, Eschiava, and welcome to Literotica and to the AH. 7,000 words is not particularly long, although it is probably longer than the usual story.

As for breaking it up into chapters, that is your choice, although I wouldn't bother, with a story of that length.

Adding a sequel is a fairly common practice. What I usually do is have a paragraph at the start of the second story saying it is a sequel to whatever the other is named. Or, you could describe it as Chapter 2, depending on how closely it follows the first story.

I strongly recommend doing something of that sort, because some readers get pissed off when they realize they have started on a sequel without having read the first part.

Eschiava said:

Ah, all right. That's something else I hadn't figured out yet, how o\long is a full page on Lit.

Thanks.

Any takers on my second question?

Click to expand...

One Lit page averages 3,767 words as tabulated by MS Word's word count function. That's plus or minus about 400 words, though, so a handy, easy to apply rule of thumb is 3,500 words.

If you want your story split into chapters, you need to decide where the chapter breaks are and submit each chapter individually. Lit will automatically break each submission into pages at somewhere around 14K characters, including spaces, hidden characters (line feeds and parapgraph breaks etc) and HTML Formatting codes -- which is why the wide +/- value for the word count average. There is some orphan control and Lit will try to match the page break with a paragraph break, but Lit will not match a page break with a chapter heading inside a single subscription.

All right!

Thanks everyone for your very helpful responses.