Shorter Chapters or a Single Long Story

[kurinax]

I am working on my first story for Literotica, and am currently at about 30000 words. It will probably be over 50000 by the time I finish it. Do you find your readers respond better to stories broken into shorter chapters, or a single large posting?

 

[John Blackhawk]

well it depends on the quality of the story. I figure 1 page on the website is about 10 pages in something like microsoft word generally. Assuming a story is a good enough quality that "i want to read it" i wouldn't go much over 5 pages generally. The more addictive reading can get by with more pages like Telfer s work "Three square meals"

Oh by the way to turn on your private messages click "user cp" and then "edit options" then turn on your private messages.

 

[SimonDoom]

I think there are about 3700 words to a Literotica page, so your story is going to be somewhere around 10 to 15 pages or so. That's longer than average, but readers at this site seem to be willing to put up with long stories if they're engaging. There are long stories on this site that get lots of views and good ratings.

My attention span and time availability tend to get taxed after 5 or 6 pages, so I personally like to see longer stories broken into separate chapters that I can read and complete, one by one. But that's just me. I'm in the process of writing some longer stories that will be 50,000 words or more, and I'm going to break them up and publish them as separate chapters, each of which I expect to be 3 to 6 pages long.

If you do that as well, you may get higher ratings, but lower views, for the later chapters, because you will filter out the readers who don't want to keep reading the story.

Good luck.

 

[SusanJillParker]

I am working on my first story for Literotica, and am currently at about 30000 words. It will probably be over 50000 by the time I finish it. Do you find your readers respond better to stories broken into shorter chapters, or a single large posting?

I posted an 86,000 word complete story, 24 Literotica pages, in the Valentine's Day contest, I Love You, Need You & Want You, Ma.

An incest story, it was a heartwarming family story about a mother and her son celebrating Valentine's Day together (lol).

It didn't get the hits that I thought that it would get but it didn't get the bashing votes that I expected it to get either. It received a decent score.

You just never know which story that the readers will fancy. I have dozens of stories with 100,000, 200,000, even 500,000 hits. I even have a story that I wrote under my WmForrester name with 2 million hits. You never know. You just need to get it out there.

I wrote two stories under my BostonFictionWriter name that I wrote in 2007, Mother-in-law Strips Naked and Sex with my Sister-in-law, Samantha. Within only two months they had 850,000 and 650,000 hits respectively. I stupidly deleted the stories from my account to publish them as e-books. I'm curious how many millions of hits they would have had 10 years later.

The problem with posting a completed story is that there's more of a chance that someone will steal your story, publish it as an e-Book, and sell it on Amazon. That happens all the time. It's happened to me more than a dozen times.

Yet, instead of getting angry, I'm biding my time. Screw the few dollars they'll make from an e-Book, when the movie comes out is when I'll sue their ass for millions of dollars.

If you're a first time writer here, you may be better off breaking your story into chapters and submitting a new chapter every other day to build up a following.

How long should a story be? As long as it takes to tell the story. Don't rush it. Perhaps your 50,000 word story would be better suited as a 30,000 word story or as an 80,000 word story.

Good luck with your story.

 

[oggbashan]

Whichever you do, some readers will think you are wrong and some will think you are right.

If you are going to split the work into chapters, each chapter should be an entity - have a start, development and an end that leads on to the next chapter. It isn't enough to just divide it up randomly because you feel it is too long in one piece.

 

[tomlitilia]

I don't think it's recommended to break a story into several chapters unless there are natural break points. Not suggesting that each chapter has to be able to stand on its own, but sometimes I've read stories where the break for chapters seems arbitrary, and it doesn't really make me want to wait for the next one.

Edit: So exactly what Ogg said above

 

[SusanJillParker]

Most times, the chapter breaks come naturally, as if exhaling a breath. Most times, you just know when to end one chapter to create the next while eliciting the most suspense.

Yet, many readers, no matter how good the writer and/or the story, refuse to read chapter stories.

I think for a writer to get the most bang for the buck, especially a new writer wanting to be noticed, should write more chapter stories.

Yet, this is something we can suggest but it's up to the writer to know what is right.

 

[SimonDoom]

I agree that it makes no sense to end chapters at places in the story that have no rhyme or reason to them. That's why in my multi-chapter story I'm trying to make sure each chapter has a setup, a middle, and a conclusion, even if temporary, of some sort.

 

[NotWise]

I'm curious why the award is "most influential" writer and not "best" writer or just "writer of the year." What people care about most is whether they liked the writer's stories, not whether they were influenced by them. In the case of non-writer readers, who are entitled to vote, as far as I know, they are not going to be influenced at all.

Hmmm. Wrong thread, I think.

 

[SimonDoom]

Hmmm. Wrong thread, I think.

You caught that before I could revise it. I couldn't figure out how to delete it, so I wrote over it.

Not enough coffee this morning, obviously.

 

[Handley_Page]

I am working on my first story for Literotica, and am currently at about 30000 words. It will probably be over 50000 by the time I finish it. Do you find your readers respond better to stories broken into shorter chapters, or a single large posting?

That's a lot of pages.
I'd suggest splitting it into parts, each running about 5 Lit pages

 

[My I]

I post the whole story when it's finished. Not before. Granted my longest story here to date is 4 lit pages. But when I am writing, I don't want to be influenced by outside sources. I don't want PMs and emails begging me for another chapter or making suggestions or hate mail that might take my interest in finishing it. Anything longer than what I have posted here is prob'ly not gonna be something FOR posting here. Maybe you can read it when it hits store shelves.

It's my story, if it takes me ten years to write then so be it. I'm writing it for me. I'm writing it for you to read. I hope you enjoy it. But I am NOT writing YOUR story. Go write your own.

That sounds selfish and asinine and I'll get a bunch more low votes for it. So be it. DaVinci didn't compromise on his works, even the ones that were commissioned. Not to compare myself to DaVinci but he is one of my role models.

EDIT: btw: As a new writer you might consider some smaller projects at first and build up to that grand finale. Get a following with the shorts and you will develop an audience that is willing to sit through a long story or multiple chapters. Starting of with a War and Peace length work you might lose a lot of your audience and end up with low votes, which can be discouraging for a new writer.

 

[Hypoxia]

I'll say it depends on how you've structured the story.

For a serial-type piece, go with a string of 3600-word 1-LIT-page chapters; all submitted at once, they'll appear on subsequent days. This could build a compulsive readership.

For a contest-entry piece, make it one long posting -- no serials allowed. A 70k-word 19-LIT-page story took a major contest not long ago. Longer tales tend to get higher scores because only dedicated readers finish and vote.

But really, write in a way and with a structure you're comfortable with. As recommended, each chapter should be a logical, delineated unit. Don't worry about a chapter's length, and don't necessarily try to be uniform. If a chapter requires 1 or 3 or 5 LIT pages, go with it. And *do* finish the story before submitting anything. You can go with the all-at-once methods I suggested above, or wait till a chapter posts before submitting the next, or otherwise submit at regular intervals. Just don't leave your readers hanging.

 

[NotWise]

I think you can post it either way, and there's also a compromise solution.

The compromise is to break your story into chapters (with chapter numbers and optionally with chapter titles) and post it as a single submission. That gives your readers opportunities to take breaks while reading and still easily find their place again.

The main difference I've seen between posting a series of chapters vs a single large post is in the feedback you get. If you post each chapter separately then you will get views/votes/favorites/comments on each chapter individually. If you post the same thing as a single long story then you will get only get views/votes/favorites/comments for one story. On the up side for making it a single long story, some people think that longer stories score higher than short stories because people who don't like it won't read to the end and vote.

The difference is mostly in what you want, not in what the readers want.

Edit: If you're interested in posting it in a topical contest, then it has to be one long story. Separate chapters aren't allowed.

 

[SimonDoom]

If you post a long story in chapters, is there an optimal length of time between posting them, if your goal is to have as many people read your story as possible? Hypoxia suggests, above, submitting them all at once, in which case they'll be posted every day. But won't you get more readers if you wait at least a few days and get as many readers as you can for each chapter individually before it drops off the new story list, which I believe happens after about five days? If you have a story in 10 chapters, you can guarantee your story will be in the new story lists for about 50 days, if you do it this way, as opposed to 15 if they are published every single day. As far as I can tell, being on the new story list is the key to getting a lot of readers.

 

[sr71plt]

I don't know if it's optimal, but the day one chapter posts I submit the next chapter. That means there's not much of a wait to read between chapters, there's no problem with one chapter not posting for some reason but the next one already being in the posting process, and it means that I, not the submissions editor, am doing the housekeeping to keep track of the posting process.

 

[SimonDoom]

I don't know if it's optimal, but the day one chapter posts I submit the next chapter. That means there's not much of a wait to read between chapters, there's no problem with one chapter not posting for some reason but the next one already being in the posting process, and it means that I, not the submissions editor, am doing the housekeeping to keep track of the posting process.

That's what I was thinking about doing, or possibly waiting until one or two days after the story posts. I've found it usually takes about three days for my stories to post after submission, although I have wondered if that's because I may not have submitted them in the most admin-friendly way, something I'm going to make an effort to do from this point forward. There was a thread about that here not long ago that I found interesting and helpful.

 

[NotWise]

That's what I was thinking about doing, or possibly waiting until one or two days after the story posts. I've found it usually takes about three days for my stories to post after submission, although I have wondered if that's because I may not have submitted them in the most admin-friendly way, something I'm going to make an effort to do from this point forward. There was a thread about that here not long ago that I found interesting and helpful.

I did about what Pilot described when I posted the first seven chapter of my longest story. I waited long enough after one story to get a sense for what the reaction was before I posted the next, so they came out every two-three days. The regular readers stayed engaged and the audience didn't shrink as much as it does with chapters posted a long time apart.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I've found it usually takes about three days for my stories to post after submission, although I have wondered if that's because I may not have submitted them in the most admin-friendly way.

3 days is pretty typical.

To speed the upload process, I find .rtf works. For some reason .txt glitches for me, using the new interface, but was ok in the old upload box. Zero formatting except para breaks, never use bold, italics blah blah blah. Just words.

 

[SimonDoom]

3 days is pretty typical.

To speed the upload process, I find .rtf works. For some reason .txt glitches for me, using the new interface, but was ok in the old upload box. Zero formatting except para breaks, never use bold, italics blah blah blah. Just words.

But if you want italics the way to do it is with .txt formatting plus use of html codes, isn't it?

 

[NotWise]

But if you want italics the way to do it is with .txt formatting plus use of html codes, isn't it?

I've always done it that way without problems. I've had contest stories go up within six hours of posting, so it isn't much of a problem for Laurel.

With the old interface you might need to specify the text encoding--at least if you aren't using a Windows system. You don't have that option with the new interface. Maybe it auto-detects the text encoding. I'm not sure, but it works.

 

[sr71plt]

A story cut and pasted into the submissions box normally takes two days to post. Yes, you have to manually code it, but you shouldn't be doing all that much coding anyway.

 

[SamScribble]

I am working on my first story for Literotica, and am currently at about 30000 words. It will probably be over 50000 by the time I finish it. Do you find your readers respond better to stories broken into shorter chapters, or a single large posting?

Back in the days when I was editing a lot of fiction, one of the first questions I asked when I got a file of 50,000 words was ‘Why?’ And, more often than not, half of the words were superfluous.

I remember one occasion on which almost 50,000 words was reduced to a bit over 10,000 words – and it won a prize.

You say that it is your first Literotica story. Are you sure that you have killed enough of your darlings?

 

[Nezhul]

A story that long you should definitely split into chapters, mainly for reader convenience and to bring structure to your story.

I find that the ideal chapter size for an online read in 3k-6k words. You can try other chapter sizes but readers don't usually take good to the stories that are too long.

 

[Zodia195]

For me personally I always divide up my longer chapters. Mostly due to the fact that when I read something, I don't always have time to read more than 3 pages on Literotica. There is only one story I know of where I was willing to read more than 5 pages simply because the story was that good. This story is still unfinished, but if this writer does come back and reposts another chapter, believe me I'll read it.

But as a rule I really don't like reading or posting long chapters.