Word Count Stats By Category (Completed)

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

So over on the editors forum someone asked about story length and was met with the expected

"the ideal length is however long it took to tell the story" Sorta response

Which that's honestly a perfectly valid answer. But it got me thinking, because in traditional publishing the reccomended word count changes based on genre. I made a hypothesis that works in certain categories would average a lower or higher word count than others.

So the only logical conclusion was to go through and write down the word count of the top 20 stories in the past year for each category containing more than 5k stories total and calculate the average to present to you all. In other words MATH. Math was the logical conclusion.

My reasoning behind this method of data collection is as follows:

-I am one pewny mortal and so I've decided to make my life easier by not including categories with less than 5k stories. (If you want to count every word in the audio or how to categories, design your own experiment and @ me, I'd like to see it.)
-Using the top 20 is a significant sample size and obviously will better gage what word counts do well/are expected of a category. Also this is a more manageable amount of data for a pewny mortal to deal with.
-I'm only including stories published in the past year because these stories are more relevant to the websites current and active readership.

[Side Note: I'm not here to tell you what the ideal story length is. This is just collected data.]

PRESENTED IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

ANAL (6.3k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 4.1k
Highest Word Count: 31.9k
Average Word Count: 10.4k
Median Word Count: 8.1k

BDSM (43k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 0.9k
Highest Word Count: 66.1k
Average Word Count: 12k
Median Word Count: 8.7k

CELEBRITIES AND FAN FICTION (15.2k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 3.4k
Highest Word Count: 16.4k
Average Word Count: 9.9k
Median Word Count: 10k

EROTIC COUPLINGS (68.7k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 0.9k
Highest Word Count: 88.9k
Average Word Count: 20.6k
Median Word Count: 10.2k

EXHIBITIONIST & VOYEUR (27.3k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 2.9k
Highest Word Count: 36.5k
Average Word Count: 10.3k
Median Word Count: 8.1k

FETISH (22.9k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 2.5k
Highest Word Count: 23.6k
Average Word Count: 9.9k
Median Word Count: 6.9k

FIRST TIME (9.3k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 6.3k
Highest Word Count: 47.5k
Average Word Count: 22.9k
Median Word Count: 21.1

GAY MALE (27.8k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 1.3k
Highest Word Count: 15.1k
Average Word Count: 7.9k
Median Word Count: 8.1k

GROUP SEX (28.5k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 1.8k
Highest Word Count: 25.2k
Average Word Count: 13.4k
Median Word Count: 12k

INCEST/TABOO (60k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 5k
Highest Word Count: 117.9k
Average Word Count: 24.7k
Median Word Count: 20.3k

INTERRACIAL LOVE (14.9k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 3.1k
Highest Word Count: 31.7k
Average Word Count: 14.7k
Median Word Count: 13.9k

LESBIAN SEX ( 20.7k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 2.8k
Highest Word Count: 67.4k
Average Word Count: 17.9k
Median Word Count: 14.8k

LOVING WIVES (40.2k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 7.5k
Highest Word Count: 63k
Average Word Count: 22.1k
Median Word Count: 21.6k

MATURE (15.7k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 6.4k
Highest Word Count: 76.8k
Average Word Count: 22.9k
Median Word Count: 19.1k

MIND CONTROL (10k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 3.3k
Highest Word Count: 25.1k
Average Word Count: 11.3k
Median Word Count: 9.4k

NONCONSENT/RELUCTANCE (33.2k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 3.4k
Highest Word Count: 42.8k
Average Word Count: 12.7k
Median Word Count: 9.8k

NONHUMAN (14.2k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 5.3k
Highest Word Count: 46.9k
Average Word Count: 12.3k
Median Word Count: 11.2k

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS (18k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 2.7k
Highest Word Count: 94.5k
Average Word Count: 19.1k
Median Word Count: 9.7k

ROMANCE (21.6k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 0.8k (789 words)
Highest Word Count: 65.2k
Average Word Count: 19.1k
Median Word Count: 17.7k

SCI-FI/FANTASY (25.7k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 3.1k
Highest Word Count: 105.5k
Average Word Count: 15.9k
Median Word Count: 7.5k

TRANSGENDER & CROSSDRESSERS (16.9k stories)
Lowest Word Count: 4.3k
Highest Word Count: 41k
Average Word Count: 17.3k
Median Word Count: 14.3k

The average word count of all the categories combined is 15.6k
I am not going to find the Median of all 420 data points because I don't want to.

WHAT DID I LEARN?
1) Despite the claim that later chapters of a series do worse, I noticed that of the stories in the top 20 that are part of a series, there were no first chapters (at least none that were labled as such in the title.)

2) Somebody wrote a Romance story in less than 800 words and it's currently number 8 in the top 20 in the category. I thought Romance being something that needs to be developed with a plot would be close to Novels and Novellas in length, which on average it was but somehow Romance has a significantly higher median (which because this is an even number of datasets is an average of two numbers, so no, if you check my work you won't find a story with the exact median word count in it's category).

3) Novels and Novellas doesn't seem to understand the point of it's own existence. Of the top 20 stories in this category 11 of them had a word count less than 10k, which is why despite having the same word count on average as the Romance category, Novels and Novellas has such a low median. Novels and Novellas had neither the highest median nor the highest average.

4) The number 1 spot only went to works with less than 10k words in 6 out of 21 categories.

5) The highest median belongs to Loving Wives.

6) The highest average belongs to Incest/Taboo.

7) There was not a single category in which the samples did NOT contain at a minimum two parts of a series on its list. I wasn't counting how many times a series took up more than one spot on the top 20, I just could not help but notice as this caused me to lose my place in the list once in every category.

CONCLUSION?
After going through the top 20 in all of these categories I'm getting suggestions for feet and incest stories. God only smiles on me because humanity is a joke and I'm the punchline.

 

[alohadave]

It would be interesting to see the median word count. A couple high word count stories could easily skew the numbers on averages, especially with only 20 samples.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

It would be interesting to see the median word count. A couple high word count stories could easily skew the numbers on averages, especially with only 20 samples.

I'll edit that in once I get the rest of the data written down

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

median word count.

Added!
... still not done with data collection, but the median exists now

 

[ElectricBlue]

Other than First Time and Incest/Taboo, that list is surprisingly uniform across the categories analysed (so far).

 

[AwkwardlySet]

How do you regard chaptered stories? Do you consider each chapter a separate story or you combine the word count from all chapters and take that as the total word count for that story? The latter approach makes much more sense, but I am not sure if you can get the actual data, without doing it manually?

 

[Voboy]

How do you regard chaptered stories? Do you consider each chapter a separate story or you combine the word count from all chapters and take that as the total word count for that story? The latter approach makes much more sense, but I am not sure if you can get the actual data, without doing it manually?

I'm assuming that if she used the "top 20 stories from the past year," that includes constituent chapters of series.

I've got no problem with that; in addition to being a pain in the ASS for anyone to total up the word counts in dozens of series simply to crunch some numbers, there's no real reason to consider stories as being "officially" one cohesive work for these purposes. If @AWhoopsieDaisy is trying to figure out a trend among individual submissions, there's no reason to glue the chapters together.

There are many reasons writers chapter their works and submit them separately. Two that come to mind are that either they regard them as independent sub-stories, or they mean for them to be read in a sitting. Either of those possibilities fits the methodology here.

Good post, OP.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

How do you regard chaptered stories? Do you consider each chapter a separate story or you combine the word count from all chapters and take that as the total word count for that story? The latter approach makes much more sense, but I am not sure if you can get the actual data, without doing it manually?

I'm using the ranked number to keep track of what stories I've already recorded and avoid counting the same work twice. Combining chaptered works would throw this off and be way more work than I think is nessicarry for the scope of this project. There's no point in combining chaptered works in data collection until LitE rolls out an update that counts chaptered stories as one item in the rankings instead of like seven. You get me?

 

[MajorRewrite]

Pewny should be a word. I’m just sayin’.

 

[NotWise]

Pewny should be a word. I’m just sayin’.

It is, but it's usually spelled "puny."

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

IT'S COMPLETED! HOORAY FOR NUMBERS!

 

[NotWise]

IT'S COMPLETED! HOORAY FOR NUMBERS!

Congratulations!

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

It is, but it's usually spelled "puny."

I didn't name myself A-Whoopsie-Daisy for nothing... haha (╯•﹏•╰)

 

[ElectricBlue]

3) Novels and Novellas doesn't seem to understand the point of it's own existence. Of the top 20 stories in this category 11 of them had a word count less than 10k, which is why despite having the same word count on average as the Romance category, Novels and Novellas has such a low median. Novels and Novellas had neither the highest median nor the highest average.

Single chapters, maybe? I suspect Sci-Fi and Fantasy is also chapter oriented.

My conclusion: First Time, LW and I&T either need tighter editors, or those guys run on more than the rest of us.

The data supports the oft quoted "optimum story/chapter length" being 2 - 3 Lit pages.

Good work, AWD. We have a new Stats Meister .

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

First Time, LW and I&T either need tighter editors, or those guys run on more than the rest of us.

First Time didn't surprise me. I don't read in that category but I assume it's a lot of coming of age, slowburn kind of stuff. I could be wrong though. I wrote down 420 numbers, I did not read 420 stories.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

Single chapters, maybe? I suspect Sci-Fi and Fantasy is also chapter oriented.

This could also be skewed by reader preferences for shorter works, which is the potential downside of using the top 20.

 

[NakedNymph]

I wrote down 420 numbers, I did not read 420 stories.

I'll add anecdotally that if I had to choose between a 1-chapter story with 80k words and a 10-chapter story with 8k words each, I'd rather read the latter because of the serialization, which builds things up over time and could lead to a more devoted following.

 

[SimonDoom]

It's interesting, but I'm not sure how much one can conclude from the data. As EB observed, there's a fairly high degree of consistency from one category to the next, once you take into account the small sample sizes.

It's possible that in some categories authors are more prone to write long stories than in others, which might skew the data.

8Letters did some analysis about three years ago of the correlation between story score and story length, and there seems to be a solid correlation: the longer the story, the higher the score is likely to be, up to around 20,000 words. To some extent, that may be the result of attrition, because it stands to reason that with longer stories the people who finish them are going to be more inclined to like them and give them a high score.

 

[MajorRewrite]

It is, but it's usually spelled "puny."

I know. But “pewny” seems to add some connotation of cuteness to puny’s primary meaning of small.

 

[MajorRewrite]

Can we infer anything from the fetish enthusiasts’ desire to keep it short?

 

[NakedNymph]

I decided to look for 8Letters's analysis and a later one focusing just on Lesbian Sex to limit cross-category effects along with the vertical slice Incest/Taboo data that you reference and I think what we ultimately have is a difference in methodology that means these two are studying effectively different things. 8Letters is about the broad swathe of Literotica stories, whereas Daisy's analysis is about the top tier of popular stories in each category. This means that the conclusions one can draw from each are fundamentally framed differently.

8Letters's analysis can suggest that average story rating goes up with pages, plateauing at around 6 pages; this is different from selecting high ratings and finding average word count from those. Neither imo is a perfect fit for any given writer, and as a result cannot necessarily be advice, but both acknowledge this regardless.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

Can we infer anything from the fetish enthusiasts’ desire to keep it short?

No stamina- I mean- excuse me while I go cough up a lung.

In all seriousness I'm not surprised Fetish was shorter as a category. A lot of porn without plot lives there.

 

[NotWise]

No stamina- I mean- excuse me while I go cough up a lung.

In all seriousness I'm not surprised Fetish was shorter as a category. A lot of porn without plot lives there.

As in Toys and Masturbation, as near as I can tell.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

As in Toys and Masturbation, as near as I can tell.

I feel like that's a given.

 

[SimonDoom]

I decided to look for 8Letters's analysis and a later one focusing just on Lesbian Sex to limit cross-category effects along with the vertical slice Incest/Taboo data that you reference and I think what we ultimately have is a difference in methodology that means these two are studying effectively different things. 8Letters is about the broad swathe of Literotica stories, whereas Daisy's analysis is about the top tier of popular stories in each category. This means that the conclusions one can draw from each are fundamentally framed differently.

8Letters's analysis can suggest that average story rating goes up with pages, plateauing at around 6 pages; this is different from selecting high ratings and finding average word count from those. Neither imo is a perfect fit for any given writer, and as a result cannot necessarily be advice, but both acknowledge this regardless.

They are different approaches. I would caution anyone about drawing prescriptive conclusions from the data about the stories in this thread. People might look at this thread and conclude, "People who read incest stories like longer stories than do people who read exhibitionist stories, so I should write longer stories in the incest category than I do for the exhibitionist category. I don't think this data supports that conclusion. There are too many variables that might explain differences in numbers from one category to the next. The sample sets might not be commensurable.