Advice on posting a story as a series

[Woody110]

Hello there!

I recently joined up and I’m excited to post my first story. It’s in many different chapters and I’d like to post them individually rather than as one long piece of work, yet I’d like them to ‘hang together’ somehow. It seems the way to go is a series.

Can you offer advice on how to go about this? Do you have experience of good and bad ways to post a multi-instalment story?

Apologies if this is covered elsewhere. If it is, I can’t find it.

Many thanks!

Woody

 

[8letters]

Don't! Post it as one story.

(Unless it's N&N or SF&F).

 

[oggbashan]

If, despite advice, you want to post it as chapters or parts, make sure you title it like this:

My story Ch.01
My story ch. 02
etc.

Make sure that the title is identical (including spacing) except for the numbers.

Do not start with 1 but 01 otherwise when you get to chapter 11 on and it will show like this:
1
11
12
13
etc.
2
3

 

[KeithD]

Hello there!

I recently joined up and I’m excited to post my first story. It’s in many different chapters and I’d like to post them individually rather than as one long piece of work, yet I’d like them to ‘hang together’ somehow. It seems the way to go is a series.

Can you offer advice on how to go about this? Do you have experience of good and bad ways to post a multi-instalment story?

Apologies if this is covered elsewhere. If it is, I can’t find it.

Many thanks!

Woody

They hang together by title linking. Open up the lists of some prolific authors here and you'll see how it's done--a unifying title slug with chapter numbers given for each one. Then the system does the "hanging together" for you. The problem is the limiting number of character spaces permitted in the title field. You have to be succinct.

How long would each chapter be of your story? That should help you decide whether to post it as one long entry or in separate chapters. The conventional wisdom here is that entries that are at least three Literotica pages (over 7,500 words) are best received. Most of the separate entries going to two pages (over 3,750 words) should be fine.

 

[Hypoxia]

'Long' depends. One LIT page is ~3750 words and one chapter may comfortably be 2-7 LIT pages. Keeping them listed together is easy. A chapter series can be named as:

Angie's Angst ch.01
Angie's Angst ch.02
Angie's Angst ch.03

A story cycle of mostly independent episodes could be named as:

Zow! Angie
Zow! Buford
Zow! Cindy ch.01
Zow! Cindy ch.02
Zow! Dingaling

Titles sort in alphanumeric order. Titles starting the same are grouped together. Click on the link in my .sig to see how it works.

 

[SimonDoom]

You've received good advice so far in this thread. Here's my two cents:

1. I don't go quite as far as 8Letters that you should not post in chapters but I agree to this extent: You should post the entire story as one unless you have a good reason to post it as chapters. Stories up to 10 Lit pages (37,500 words) do just fine here, so there's no particularly good reason to break up a story unless you have a reason, especially if the story is done.

2. Follow the advice you've already gotten on the format for naming each chapter.

3. KeithD is right about chapter length. Scores tend to go up as stories go up to 3 pages or more. So it makes no sense if your story is done to post it in a series of very short chapters.

4. If possible, it's better for all chapters to be filed in the same category, because you are less likely to lose your readers (some readers of one category hate stories from another category. Pick the category, if you can, that best captures the story as a whole.

5. Try to make sure each chapter offers what readers of that category will want. Otherwise you'll leave readers disappointed. If you can't do that, that's a good reason NOT to publish your story as a series of chapters.

6. Try if you can not to publish chapters too far apart, or you'll lose readers. I've done this, so don't do what I do!

Good luck.

 

[oggbashan]

...

6. Try if you can not to publish chapters too far apart, or you'll lose readers. I've done this, so don't do what I do!

Good luck.

Added to 6.

Don't copy me and make readers wait 10+ years for a story to end.

(First two chapters of Christmas Fairy in 2004. Third and last in 2017!)

 

[yukonnights]

Only additional suggestion I'd make is a tag onto Simon's #6 above; If you're story is 100% complete at the time of submission, I like to submit them all on the same day. They will then be automatically published in sequence every couple of days. I usually add a note to the reader up front that informs them of this. (There are too many stalled series here, and I've had readers thank me for letting them know starting in that mine won't be another one.)

Welcome to Lit, and good luck on you story.

EDIT: Ogg beat me to it while I was writing

 

[KeithD]

5. Try to make sure each chapter offers what readers of that category will want. Otherwise you'll leave readers disappointed. If you can't do that, that's a good reason NOT to publish your story as a series of chapters.

This merits close attention, I think. When I started with publishers in writing erotica for pay, every publisher included in their guidelines that there should be a sex act in every chapter. This has been relaxed in the Internet revolution, but I think it still holds pretty well (and I keep that in mind when I write, even if I don't always deliver for some reason or other. I know why I didn't). A chapter will suffer, I think, if it doesn't include some aspect of whatever theme the whole series is highlighting. It's just a reality, I think.

 

[KeithD]

Only additional suggestion I'd make is a tag onto Simon's #6 above; If you're story is 100% complete at the time of submission, I like to submit them all on the same day. They will then be automatically published in sequence every couple of days. I usually add a note to the reader up front that informs them of this. (There are too many stalled series here, and I've had readers thank me for letting them know starting in that mine won't be another one.)

Welcome to Lit, and good luck on you story.

EDIT: Ogg beat me to it while I was writing

My series is finished before I post the first part, but I don't submit them all at once. I feel that Laurel is busy enough not to have to deal with this for me. I submit a chapter, wait for it to post, and then submit the next one, taking this responsibility on myself.

 

[yukonnights]

My series is finished before I post the first part, but I don't submit them all at once. I feel that Laurel is busy enough not to have to deal with this for me. I submit a chapter, wait for it to post, and then submit the next one, taking this responsibility on myself.

My take is; it's on autopilot. They come out like clockwork. There's so much mystery about what goes on behind the curtain of the Great Wizard

 

[ElectricBlue]

My take is; it's on autopilot. They come out like clockwork. There's so much mystery about what goes on behind the curtain of the Great Wizard

Yes, it's autopilot. On my eleven chapter novel length thing, each chapter posted exactly 24 hours after the previous. Laurel vetted the whole thing at the same time, then set a clock running for the midnight server runs. Probably an effective use of her time, seeing the whole thing together, rather than jumping between other themes, other stories.

It's no different than pre-loading contest stories or anthology stories to go live on a set date. My entry into the 750 Word thing, for example, is cleared and loaded with a "go live" three weeks in the future. Neither Laurel nor I need to do anything now. Computers are clever like that, keeping time.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Yes, it's autopilot. On my eleven chapter novel length thing, each chapter posted exactly 24 hours after the previous. Laurel vetted the whole thing at the same time, then set a clock running for the midnight server runs. Probably an effective use of her time, seeing the whole thing together, rather than jumping between other themes, other stories.

It's no different than pre-loading contest stories or anthology stories to go live on a set date. My entry into the 750 Word thing, for example, is cleared and loaded with a "go live" three weeks in the future. Neither Laurel nor I need to do anything now. Computers are clever like that, keeping time.

Actually, she just has to set the publish date, the autopilot takes care only to publish stories equal to the current date.

 

[Woody110]

Hi everyone. Thanks to all of you for sharing your advice and experiences - I appreciate you taking the time to help a noob.

To explain things a bit further, the story I plan on posting is about 72,000 words. The action lends itself to six separate chapters of different lengths. In Lit terms, the shortest chapter would be three pages and the longest would be six or seven. It’s gay fiction which appears to have just one category, so that solves one potential problem for me. Although the story has reached a conclusion, there is scope to develop it further and I guess this is why the idea of chapters appeals so much - I can add more instalments and they will fit right in. If anyone has any further thoughts on this I’d love to hear them.

Thanks again to you all! Woody

 

[sdsioux]

Woody what I do is to link the chapters together as the word amount can vary. I'll use something as simple as the phone rings... to end the chapter and then answer it at the beginning of the next chapter.

 

[yukonnights]

Hi everyone. Thanks to all of you for sharing your advice and experiences - I appreciate you taking the time to help a noob.

To explain things a bit further, the story I plan on posting is about 72,000 words. The action lends itself to six separate chapters of different lengths. In Lit terms, the shortest chapter would be three pages and the longest would be six or seven. It’s gay fiction which appears to have just one category, so that solves one potential problem for me. Although the story has reached a conclusion, there is scope to develop it further and I guess this is why the idea of chapters appeals so much - I can add more instalments and they will fit right in. If anyone has any further thoughts on this I’d love to hear them.

Thanks again to you all! Woody

Woody,

It's very likely that the number of readers will drop with each chapter. This seems to be the norm, so don't panic. As to your thought/comment that the story has the potential to continue after the last current chapter, my only thought is; It might be a good idea to; 1) Leave an obvious bread-crumb that makes the reader want more, 2) Perhaps leave a 'Note to Readers' at the end of the last chapter thanking those who finished and asking for comments/feedback on their thoughts of continuing, etc.

 

[Woody110]

Woody what I do is to link the chapters together as the word amount can vary. I'll use something as simple as the phone rings... to end the chapter and then answer it at the beginning of the next chapter.

Hi sdsioux. Thanks for the advice on using chapters. The site I posted on before had a 10,000 character limit per post and I ended up using the technique you mentioned quite a lot there. I always tried to end an instalment on something that acted as a natural pause or bridge. Lit seems to offer so much more freedom, and my plan is to use that as much as I can. Here I can divide the story up in a way that feels more much relevant to the action - different days. This is why some chapters are longer than others, but they still flow quite well - I hope, at least!

 

[ElectricBlue]

Hi everyone. Thanks to all of you for sharing your advice and experiences - I appreciate you taking the time to help a noob.

To explain things a bit further, the story I plan on posting is about 72,000 words. The action lends itself to six separate chapters of different lengths. In Lit terms, the shortest chapter would be three pages and the longest would be six or seven. It’s gay fiction which appears to have just one category, so that solves one potential problem for me. Although the story has reached a conclusion, there is scope to develop it further and I guess this is why the idea of chapters appeals so much - I can add more instalments and they will fit right in. If anyone has any further thoughts on this I’d love to hear them.

Thanks again to you all! Woody

That's a good combination for story length and number of chapters, I reckon. I have a 103k novel across twelve chapters, with no hard and fast rules on individual chapter length, but it's the same ballpark (2 - 4 Lit pages per chapter).

Chaptering makes navigation a little easier for readers over a long story, and has an added bonus - you'll find out how many people read the whole story. I'll predict a large drop in Views over the first three chapters, then roughly the same Views over chapters 3 - 6..

 

[Woody110]

Hi again, yukonnights. Your message appeared as I was replying to sdsioux and I missed it until now. Thanks for coming back and giving more insight. Thanks also electricblue66.

You both mentioned similar experiences of reader numbers dropping over the chapters. To my mind, a complete and unbroken story is equally likely to suffer from drop off as the story goes on and people maybe grow tired of it or discover it’s not quite what they expected. Could it simply be a case that a chaptered story highlights this phenomenon whereas a ‘one post’ story does not? I’m not familiar enough with Lit to know either way. I struggle to see why a chaptered story would lose readers otherwise. As electricblue mentioned, navigation becomes easier and that seems like a plus. I guess there are a few more page jumps required to read the entire story, but that doesn’t seem like a big deal to me if it has grabbed my attention. I don’t know - maybe I’m just missing some obvious factors that will become clear when I start contributing.

I hope this post doesn’t come across as if I’m doubting the advice given or questioning established norms - I’m only looking to understand the site better.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Could it simply be a case that a chaptered story highlights this phenomenon whereas a ‘one post’ story does not?

Correct. With a stand-alone story there is zero way of knowing how many people finish reading. With a multi-chapter story you get more of a clue by looking at the View counts at chapter 3 and the following chapters. My experience (admittedly not with a huge sample size of long stories) is a 50% reduction from chapter one to two, another 50% drop to chapter three, and steady state from then on (with occasional chapter peaks that I attribute to some folk reading that chapter twice).

On that not very scientific basis, I work on the premise that for a long stand-alone story, maybe 20% - 30% of your View count will be full read throughs, if you're lucky.

Having said that, the second chapter of my last long piece is tracking around 90% the view count of the first chapter, followed by a huge drop to chapter three (but high scores). I can't explain that one.

 

[JGittes]

My first submission, nearly three years ago, was a 37K word attempt in the exhibitionist & voyeur category. It naturally divided into six parts and I submitted it as six separate chapters. I've since changed my mind and would now submit it as one story with internal 'chapter' markings. It suffered a 70% reduction in views ch 1 to ch 2 and a 60% reduction ch 2 to ch 3, where it stabilized.

Earlier this month I posted an 18K word story to incest & taboo, in one five page submission. I was used to the views and votes in E&V and was shocked by the response in I&T. For the entire 2 3/4 years the E&V story has been up, ch 1 had 17K views and 124 votes, and ch 6 had 7K views and 49 votes. The I&T story has 63K views and 820 votes in three weeks.

These are two different categories so comparisons between multi-chapter and single, long-word count stories aren't directly applicable, however, that won't stop me from making them. Given similar levels of grammatical writing and story-telling ability, the single story submission allows readers to experience the full scope of what you want to say. If they like it, they really like it. If they don't, well, there are a few one bombs in there.

The multi-chapter story had a much lower ratio of views to votes. I feel that may be a better indication of readers who make it to the end of the complete story than drop off in views per chapter. Obviously, a reader didn't make it through to the end of the story if they didn't read the last chapter, but I think that many readers will hold off on voting on individual chapters to see if the story maintains its quality over the entire run.

All of this assumes that the total story is completed when you begin submission.

 

[SimonDoom]

Hi again, yukonnights. Your message appeared as I was replying to sdsioux and I missed it until now. Thanks for coming back and giving more insight. Thanks also electricblue66.

You both mentioned similar experiences of reader numbers dropping over the chapters. To my mind, a complete and unbroken story is equally likely to suffer from drop off as the story goes on and people maybe grow tired of it or discover it’s not quite what they expected. Could it simply be a case that a chaptered story highlights this phenomenon whereas a ‘one post’ story does not? I’m not familiar enough with Lit to know either way. I struggle to see why a chaptered story would lose readers otherwise. As electricblue mentioned, navigation becomes easier and that seems like a plus. I guess there are a few more page jumps required to read the entire story, but that doesn’t seem like a big deal to me if it has grabbed my attention. I don’t know - maybe I’m just missing some obvious factors that will become clear when I start contributing.

I hope this post doesn’t come across as if I’m doubting the advice given or questioning established norms - I’m only looking to understand the site better.

These are fair and reasonable questions. Here's what I've observed:

With a story published in multiple chapters, there is a significant dropoff in views from Ch. 1 to Ch. 2. This is a nearly universal phenomenon. It could be explained by a variety of things. First, the viewers who started Ch. 1 but never finished (their views count) never bother to even view ch. 2. Second, some people who see "Ch. 2" when it's published for the first time don't want to bother to hunt for Ch. 1 and start the story, and they don't want to start a story in the middle. Third, it appears to be the case that many people won't even view a story that has "Ch. 1" in it. They want a quick one-off and don't want to get started on a story with multiple parts. The most-viewed stories tend to be standalone stories. So when you publish a story that has the appendage "Ch. 1" in it, you turn off a significant set of readers right off the bat.

You are correct that the longer a story is, the fewer viewers will finish it. But this is much less true than you would think. You can tell, because the view:vote ratio does not increase as quickly or predictably for longer stories as you would think it would. I've written standalone and chapters stories in similar categories with similar themes, prose style, and length, so I think I can make some meaningful comparisons.

The one benefit of publishing a story in multiple chapters, from the standpoint of capturing readers, is that each publication is an advertisement for your story. For some period of time that chapter will be on the new story list and on the story category hub. So the story as a whole will get some extra exposure. When you publish Ch. X to your story, views to Ch. 1 will get a boost, as will views to every chapter between 1 and X. But my impression is that this added bit of exposure does NOT offset the greater number of views that a standalone story gets. If it WERE true, we would expect to see more Chapter 1s at the tops of most-viewed toplists, and for the most part we don't. A standalone story seems to be the way to capture the most views, and, presumably, reads.

 

[8letters]

You both mentioned similar experiences of reader numbers dropping over the chapters. To my mind, a complete and unbroken story is equally likely to suffer from drop off as the story goes on and people maybe grow tired of it or discover it’s not quite what they expected.

You're missing the biggest disadvantage of a chaptered story over a whole story - a lot of people won't read a chapter story. I did a statistical analysis of LitE stories here and found that first chapters got 75% of the views that whole stories get.

As others have mentioned, my personal experience is that the drop off is huge from chapter one to chapter two. I published a five-chapter story over five days. Chapter one has 176.2K views and chapter two has 70k views. What I also see is the people don't significantly comment on all but the last chapter unless they don't like the chapter. My comments on the five chapters are 25, 18, 22, 58 and 59. I can't read the comments on the fourth chapter as they are so toxic.

When I first started thinking about writing for LitE, I was planning on writing a multi-chapter epic that was going to be ~250K words. I had the first couple of chapters written, and I decided to take a break and publish something shorter. I'm so glad I did. My writing technique when I started sucked - bad grammar, awkward phrasing in dialogue, poor formatting, etc. I hadn't written fiction before and, boy oh boy, did it show. It took me publishing a number of stories for me to become a good writer.

So what if I had gone ahead and started my multi-chapter epic? My bad writing technique would have turned off a lot of readers. There's a huge drop off for chapter vs whole, and a huge drop off from the first chapter. I would have been spending all this time writing for an audience that would have been much smaller than I actually wrote for once I abandoned the idea of writing the epic. Even worse, I realize now the the first two chapters weren't that interesting. Being a newbie, I was way too optimistic about their appeal.

So don't make the newbie mistake of starting your publishing career on LitE with a multi-chapter epic. Start with a whole story. You'll learn so much from publishing that. And then do the next story and the next story.

 

[SimonDoom]

You're missing the biggest disadvantage of a chaptered story over a whole story - a lot of people won't read a chapter story. I did a statistical analysis of LitE stories here and found that first chapters got 75% of the views that whole stories get.

As others have mentioned, my personal experience is that the drop off is huge from chapter one to chapter two. I published a five-chapter story over five days. Chapter one has 176.2K views and chapter two has 70k views. What I also see is the people don't significantly comment on all but the last chapter unless they don't like the chapter. My comments on the five chapters are 25, 18, 22, 58 and 59. I can't read the comments on the fourth chapter as they are so toxic.

When I first started thinking about writing for LitE, I was planning on writing a multi-chapter epic that was going to be ~250K words. I had the first couple of chapters written, and I decided to take a break and publish something shorter. I'm so glad I did. My writing technique when I started sucked - bad grammar, awkward phrasing in dialogue, poor formatting, etc. I hadn't written fiction before and, boy oh boy, did it show. It took me publishing a number of stories for me to become a good writer.

So what if I had gone ahead and started my multi-chapter epic? My bad writing technique would have turned off a lot of readers. There's a huge drop off for chapter vs whole, and a huge drop off from the first chapter. I would have been spending all this time writing for an audience that would have been much smaller than I actually wrote for once I abandoned the idea of writing the epic. Even worse, I realize now the the first two chapters weren't that interesting. Being a newbie, I was way too optimistic about their appeal.

So don't make the newbie mistake of starting your publishing career on LitE with a multi-chapter epic. Start with a whole story. You'll learn so much from publishing that. And then do the next story and the next story.

I agree with all this.

I realize your (this is addressed to the OP) proposed story is expected to be 72K words, not 250K words, and that's a big difference. But 72K is still the size of a full novel. If you have not published ANY stories at Literotica, I strongly recommend writing a short story first -- 10 to 15,000 words, perhaps. See how it's received. See what readers say. See how you like it, and what you need to improve. You'll get a better feel for how to answer your own question the right way.

 

[ElectricBlue]

So don't make the newbie mistake of starting your publishing career on LitE with a multi-chapter epic. Start with a whole story. You'll learn so much from publishing that. And then do the next story and the next story.

Agree this, absolutely. Toddle before you walk, walk before you run, run many miles before you do long distance. It takes a couple of hundred thou words before you're comfortable in your own style, I reckon, let alone being ready enough to take on something big. You need chutzpah before you do hubris .