A Question...

[Daniellekitten]

It's been a long time since I posted new chapters on my ongoing story lines. My question: How long is a reasonable length for a chapter submission?

 

[HandsInTheDark]

It's been a long time since I posted new chapters on my ongoing story lines. My question: How long is a reasonable length for a chapter submission?

Doesn't matter, if the content is interesting.

Long chapters do mean higher ratings; people who don't like it get bored and bail befre they reach the rating page.

 

[Hypoxia]

A single submission may be anywhere from 750 words on up, like to over 100,000. I edited Roz's PURELY SINFUL at 70,000+ words; she won the 2014 Hallowe'en contest. Make each submission as long as it needs to be.

 

[PennLady]

It's been a long time since I posted new chapters on my ongoing story lines. My question: How long is a reasonable length for a chapter submission?

Good to see you

Whatever works, I think is good. I have found for a lot of readers the sweet spot is 8-12k, or about 3 Lit screen pages, give or take. However, if you need things to be longer, then write it that way.

 

[NotWise]

My favorite advice (not from Lit) was "your chapters should be as long as it takes to tell the story."

I've read books with chapters as short as a few paragraphs (Moby Dick, for instance) and whole books that consisted of just a few chapters. For Lit you have to keep in mind the 750-word minimum.

 

[RejectReality]

Three Lit pages is the sweet spot, as far as I'm concerned. Any shorter and readers tend to complain. Any longer, and a lot of people will bow out without reading even word one.

If the chapter fits in there, that works perfectly. If a few skew short or long, it doesn't really matter as long as they don't go too far in either direction.

 

[TxRad]

Good to see you DK. It's been a while.

PennLady & RR have the right of it for the sweet spot but you know as well as i do that with your writing, it's all good.

 

[GforGraham]

If your story needs more than you want in one issue, then break it down over many parts.

 

[soflabbwlvr]

Then thou must count to three. Three shall be the number of the counting and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count two, excepting that thou then proceedeth to three. Five is right out.

 

[sr71plt]

I've had readers complain when a chapter didn't go over one Lit. page (about 3,750 words), but not at any other length. I ignore the complaints, though, because as has already been noted, a chapter is denoted by what's in it and where it fits in the overall text, not by its wordage.

 

[JKendallDane]

It's been a long time since I posted new chapters on my ongoing story lines. My question: How long is a reasonable length for a chapter submission?

Good to see you, DK.

With 127 stories and the sea of red attached to them, you should be the one we are asking the questions of.

My personal opinion is "as long (or short) as necessary" but as far as technicalities and a general rule, I believe RR nailed it the best. Shoot for three pages and don't worry if it's over or under a reasonable amount.

 

[sr71plt]

Shoot for the number of words to get the job done, not pages.

 

[RejectReality]

The problem with "as long as it needs to be", at least on the short side, is that chapters are released at a maximum of one per day on Lit.

If you hit a short chapter in a novel, the next chapter is only a page turn away. On Lit, if you're following as a story is posted, that next chapter is 24 hours away. That's where you run into the problem with readers feeling let down by a snack-sized chunk of story.

There's nothing to say that every submission has to be a single chapter, either. I've suggested that approach to several people over the years. If you have two chapters that aren't going to go too long when combined, that goes over better than two short chapters back to back.

 

[sr71plt]

I don't need readers who would be upset by a short chapter in a chaptered series.

On the "Drugs" thread you just gave a "wow" at someone who would give a 1 rating on the basis of only one element in a story. The length of one chapter in a series is just one element in a story--and not an important element in the least.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Nice to see your back...

Whatever works for the story. 3 lit pages, 11 lit pages, it probably matters not to your fans.

 

[RejectReality]

In this case, I'm not talking about someone who says, "This chapter is 250 words too short, so I'm done with this shitty author." I'm talking about the people who are following your story and end up feeling let down by the 24 hour wait for short chapters.

If you can keep them happy with something so simple as "My Story Ch. 02-03", what's the harm? You're not altering your original work. You're not writing to some specific wordage. You're presenting the same work in a way that seems to please and retain readers better than short chapters.

 

[sr71plt]

In the traditional world of publishing (before the e-revolution), the "ideal" length of a chapter in a novel was twenty pages--5,000 words (one and a half Lit. pages). This was determined to be the most comfortable length for a reader. (The mainstream still holds this standard for literary and general novels--breathless thrillers go for far shorter chapters.) The e-revolution came along and the reader comfort/attention span was actually reduced--as was the desired length of short stories. Traditionally they could go to 20,000 words. Suddenly in the technology era short story competitions were reduced to a maximum of 3,000 or 3,500 words (one Lit. page) as were the max wordage requirements for being published in magazines (a few high-brow literary magazines have held out for traditional specs, but only a few--certainly not any erotica ones). The attention span of readers and the comfort in reading on screens has reduced the desired wordage. And along came thriller writers throwing in 500-word chapters and becoming best-sellers.

So, how have Literotica folks come to advising that the desired length of chapters is three-Lit. pages--something over 7,500 words--which not only flies in the face of traditional specs but also in the face of where the e-revolution and reading on the screen have taken the publishing world? I must think that it's something peculiar to a set of Literotica folks--not a publishing world trend. I think it's something peculiar to the Lit. rating system, where technical issues of posting series have weighted higher scores to long series, unsophisticated readers have somehow equated that anomaly to "better than others," and writers have gone with the flow in whoring themselves to getting higher ratings and therefore falsely identifying those higher scores to higher-quality writing.

And, as such, I think it's hooey for anyone wanting to write to the world beyond Literotica. Ratings here don't mean so much to me to move me to prostituting myself to what I think are false and Literotica-specific views of what the length of anything should be. And when a reader tells me that my chapter is too short, I just discount them as a reader I want following my stories--even less so than the readers who continually ask where the rest of the story is when I damn well know it's already a complete story.

 

[Darkniciad]

We're not talking about the wider publishing world. The question was about the trends on Lit, and that's what we're discussing. There are enough of us with stories/chapters of various lengths who have all seen the same trends to come to a general consensus about it.

Nobody has to cram their story into a box to accommodate it, but when asked, we're going to answer with what our experience tells us provides the best results.

 

[sr71plt]

And I'm suggesting that your sense of reward is both false and a form of prostitution without benefit--that it's crippling rather than enhancing writing development. I think those reading about "what's better" deserve to know that "what's better" for Literotica is fish bowl rather than an ocean choice and they are letting themselves be fooled if they think that pursing high ratings here is actually developing their writing abilities. What gets high ratings here has little to do with story quality and a lot to do with Literotica-specific gaming.

 

[Darkniciad]

It's not all about ratings, either. The trends we're seeing are taking into account the comments, views, favorites, vote to view ratios, view retention, and everything else. No matter the statistic, the "sweet spot" we're describing for length performs best here on Lit.

There's nothing wrong with taking into account the wider publishing trends, if that's the direction you plan to go. It's shooting your work in the foot if you ignore the trends of the specific market you're serving here at Lit, though. That's especially true when you can split or combine chapters in submissions to accommodate those trends without changing the original work at all.

It may not always be possible to serve the story and do that, but when it is, it's an action that will yield positive results here.

 

[sr71plt]

Well, yes, as long as you keep straight on the realization that striving for ratings success at Literotica doesn't equate with improving your actual writing ability--that it might actually be harming your writing development.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

I examined 3 novels. Word count per page averaged 450. Pages per chapter varied from 10 to 15. On average chapter pages were 11 pages.

I shoot for 2 LIT pages or less per chapter. That's close to the print numbers.


John O'Hara advised limits for what can be read in one comfortable sitting.

 

[TxRad]

I examined 3 novels. Word count per page averaged 450. Pages per chapter varied from 10 to 15. On average chapter pages were 11 pages.

I shoot for 2 LIT pages or less per chapter. That's close to the print numbers.


John O'Hara advised limits for what can be read in one comfortable sitting.

The same answer SR gave for novels but the question was for here on Lit.

 

[Darkniciad]

The classic print writers would most likely say that accommodating for screen readers is harming people's writing development and pandering to the unwashed masses as well.

I serve the market I'm writing for. If something I write doesn't serve that market without sacrificing the story I want to tell, I take it to another market. That's why you can't find everything I've written anywhere except on my own website.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

The same answer SR gave for novels but the question was for here on Lit.

I need to have you house trained so I can use you for a guide dog.