Forcing Page Breaks

[TheExperimentalist]

Depends on the length of the individual scenes, I reckon. Questions like this without word counts are impossible to answer sensibly. You might be thinking 500 words, I might be thinking 5000.

In my latest piece, with two long chapters (10k and 15k) and a very short interlude (1k), about half of the two longer chapters is scene setting, followed by a series of sex scenes.

As @liliput1 commented:

Previous conversation context was chapters of around 1000 words.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Previous conversation context was chapters of around 1000 words.

Way too short, I reckon. That's just over a quarter of a Lit page. The consensus for an ideal chapter length is 2 - 4 Lit pages (7500 - 15000 words).

* * * *

If you're thinking a thousand words is your scene length, use a simple scene break, like the one shown here. Longer stories (20k - 40k) are very common here on Lit. You might want to think about a single stand-alone story, with internal chapters.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

This same question arises periodically. The answer is always the same.

It's irritating when you get to the bottom of pg 7 of an 8-page story, then click on the 8 and find literally one line of text before... fin. That happened to me recently while reading. If that was my story (and it has been, lol), I would want the last "page" (at just one line) folded into the prior pages somehow, just for the sake of non-clunkiness.

So, it's a matter of aesthetics rather than serving any literary or functional purpose?

 

[BobbyBrandt]

My short story takes place in three parts and has three locations. On another site, I submitted the story as three chapters, but I'm getting some push-back against doing that here.

In terms of word length, the first section is the shortest and the third is the longest, however each section is still less than one page each. Divided the way I want to, between scenes, the story would be three pages long. Smooshed together, the breaks would occur at some random location which makes no narrative sense.

I'm sorry, but what you are saying makes no sense to me.

That's not a criticism, just my admission that I do not understand your issue. Is it a stylistic preference for you or does it somehow negatively influence what you wrote?

 

[Voboy]

I don't know. For me personally as a reader, I think I'd prefer it as chapters, so long as I know I can expect 'the good stuff' in each.

"The good stuff" in a mere thousand words, accompanied by the necessary character development and then repeated over several chapters, is not likely to be "good stuff."

 

[usable001]

To make sure there are several paragraphs on the last page, rather than just a single sentence

Is the fact that the system is going to create a short final page no matter what you do a bizarre proven fact or pessimism?

 

[usable001]

Is it a stylistic preference for you or does it somehow negatively influence what you wrote?

It is a minor bit of curiosity about how the site works and whether it can accommodate a specific stylistic preference, which has ballooned into a much larger discussion than ever intended.

I like to understand how things work, that's all.

I essentially said, "Hmm, I wonder if..", jotted down a quick note on the forum, and went about my day. Don't assign the topic more emotional involvement from me than that.

Or you could just define them with a horizontal line

This is what I decided I was going to do, a while ago, if my story got rejected again (which it was).

 

[ElectricBlue]

Is the fact that the system is going to create a short final page no matter what you do a bizarre proven fact or pessimism?

As I had established that, no matter what I did to try to get a single sentence onto the previous page, and I knew for a fact that my style gets 3750 words to a page, it was subsequently a no-brainer to submit 8000 word stories, or 12000 word stories (and so on), to steer clear of the3750 increments. Simple maths, based on empirical knowledge.

 

[ElectricBlue]

So, it's a matter of aesthetics rather than serving any literary or functional purpose?

Pretty much, yes.

 

[usable001]

it was subsequently a no-brainer to submit 8000 word stories, or 12000 word stories (and so on), to steer clear of the 3750 increments

So it's more like rounding up (7,500 to 8,000, 11,250 to 12,000, etc) than adding a specific number. I understand.

 

[SimonDoom]

Why would one insert a page break into a Literotica story, given its formatting?

 

[SimonDoom]

Previous conversation context was chapters of around 1000 words.

There have been previous threads with data and analysis, pretty clearly demonstrating that publishing a story in separate chapters of 1000 words, as opposed to combining the chapters into a single published story, will yield fewer views and noticeably lower scores.

 

[usable001]

This post is a topic that deserves its own forum thread, but for the reasons stated in this post below, I don't think I should be the one listed on the OP.

If I opened a chaptered piece and saw that each chapter was less than 3-4 Lit pages, I would never click on that writer again. [emphasis mine]

As someone who likes to experiment with their writing and try new things, I found this more upsetting than the opinion of one person should be.

I've made enough forum posts in my first few weeks on this site, throwing out random ideas and asking questions, that I'm positive my opinion carries very little weight with the powers that be. Could I get assistance from someone (or several people) who is more established and respected?

For other people who share Voboy's opinion, could the powers that be on Literorica create a "short story/flash fiction" category?

• Of all the information shown on an author's page, a story's category is among the most prominent.
• A story's length (or lack of length) is very important to a potentially large portion of Literotica's readership.
• A clear "short story/flash fiction" category would allow readers who care to access the portions of an author's work they like and skip over what they don't, without going so far as to completely dismiss an author they might otherwise like.

This post is a topic that deserves its own forum thread, but for the reasons stated in this post above, I don't think I should be the one listed on the OP.

Edit:
My impatience won, and I created the forum thread anyway.
https://forum.literotica.com/threads/a-34th-category-suggestion-short-stories.1657268/

 

[Voboy]

This post is a topic that deserves its own forum thread, but for the reasons stated in this post below, I don't think I should be the one listed on the OP.



As someone who likes to experiment with their writing and try new things, I found this more upsetting than the opinion of one person should be.

I've made enough forum posts in my first few weeks on this site, throwing out random ideas and asking questions, that I'm positive my opinion carries very little weight with the powers that be. Could I get assistance from someone (or several people) who is more established and respected?

For other people who share Voboy's opinion, could the powers that be on Literorica create a "short story/flash fiction" category?

• Of all the information shown on an author's page, a story's category is among the most prominent.
• A story's length (or lack of length) is very important to a potentially large portion of Literotica's readership.
• A clear "short story/flash fiction" category would allow readers who care to access the portions of an author's work they like and skip over what they don't, without going so far as to completely dismiss an author they might otherwise like.

View attachment 2639749

This post is a topic that deserves its own forum thread, but for the reasons stated in this post above, I don't think I should be the one listed on the OP.

Don’t take it personally. There are WAAAAAY too many fish in the sea here. Thousands of writers doing tens of thousands of stories; if I don’t like a writer’s style, I’ll just find another.

But! Plenty of readers don’t care for my style, either, and nope right out of anything I’ve written. That’s okay. Different strokes and all that.

 

[TheExperimentalist]

Different strokes and all that.

Or different strokers, in some cases.

 

[usable001]

Don’t take it personally.

I don't.

However, one thing I am interested in is marketing: how do I help people who like what I write find what they like, without inviting along people who will hate it? What words which I use in the short description will make people think this particular story is something that it isn't? The request I made previously is just an offshoot of that.

I've seen some authors who post stacks of stories with similar themes: this author loves writing about strangers having gay sex, while this author loves incestuous fraternal twins, etc. On the other hand, my stories vary quite a bit from each other, both in length and subject matter.

I'm also positive that you are not alone in your dislike of shorter stories, and a clearly labeled category for them is an easy fix.

 

[usable001]

Why would one insert a page break into a Literotica story, given its formatting?

I don't understand your question. How would having some control over the formatting of a story be disrupted by the formatting of that same story?

 

[SimonDoom]

I don't understand your question. How would having some control over the formatting of a story be disrupted by the formatting of that same story?

I don't see any benefit from a page break in a Literotica story. I don't see the point.

Think of it from the reader's POV. A Literotica page is one you scroll through to the bottom, then you click to go the next page. Each page contains approximately 3750 words.

Why, given this format, would you want, as an author, a chapter to end midway through a page, and then require the reader to scroll all the way to the bottom and have to click to get to the next page?

Just insert a few line breaks and then start your new chapter. That will do it. This will give the reader a better, more consistent, more continuous experience.

 

[TheExperimentalist]

I don't see any benefit from a page break in a Literotica story. I don't see the point.

Think of it from the reader's POV. A Literotica page is one you scroll through to the bottom, then you click to go the next page. Each page contains approximately 3750 words.

Why, given this format, would you want, as an author, a chapter to end midway through a page, and then require the reader to scroll all the way to the bottom and have to click to get to the next page?

Just insert a few line breaks and then start your new chapter. That will do it. This will give the reader a better, more consistent, more continuous experience.

I don't think the point would be to have empty space one would need to scroll through before seeing the page controls. Similar to the last page of a work, or works shorter than a single page, the interface could grow or shrink to accommodate whatever size was necessary. (I know, I know, that's what she said.)

 

[usable001]

Why, given this format, would you want, as an author, a chapter to end midway through a page, and then require the reader to scroll all the way to the bottom

I explicitly don't want that. The goal of the conversation, from the very beginning, was to see if an author could manually determine where in the narrative on a page ends (say 3624 words instead of 3750) without doing some kind of clunky workaround.

Edit:
I said as much, very early in the conversation
https://forum.literotica.com/threads/forcing-page-breaks.1657176/post-103126270

 

[IWroteThis]

Does that apply even when each of those chapters is its own, self-contained sex scene?

If what you're writing is pure no-plot strokers, maybe not. It depends on if your audience can get off in those 1000 words (or is even willing to try).

 

[IWroteThis]

This post is a topic that deserves its own forum thread, but for the reasons stated in this post below, I don't think I should be the one listed on the OP.



As someone who likes to experiment with their writing and try new things, I found this more upsetting than the opinion of one person should be.

I've made enough forum posts in my first few weeks on this site, throwing out random ideas and asking questions, that I'm positive my opinion carries very little weight with the powers that be. Could I get assistance from someone (or several people) who is more established and respected?

For other people who share Voboy's opinion, could the powers that be on Literorica create a "short story/flash fiction" category?

• Of all the information shown on an author's page, a story's category is among the most prominent.
• A story's length (or lack of length) is very important to a potentially large portion of Literotica's readership.
• A clear "short story/flash fiction" category would allow readers who care to access the portions of an author's work they like and skip over what they don't, without going so far as to completely dismiss an author they might otherwise like.

View attachment 2639749

This post is a topic that deserves its own forum thread, but for the reasons stated in this post above, I don't think I should be the one listed on the OP.

The problem is, a story broken into short chapters is not a short story nor flash fiction, so it wouldn't fit in such a category.

 

[Duil2]

I don't.

However, one thing I am interested in is marketing: how do I help people who like what I write find what they like, without inviting along people who will hate it? What words which I use in the short description will make people think this particular story is something that it isn't? The request I made previously is just an offshoot of that.

I've seen some authors who post stacks of stories with similar themes: this author loves writing about strangers having gay sex, while this author loves incestuous fraternal twins, etc. On the other hand, my stories vary quite a bit from each other, both in length and subject matter.

I'm also positive that you are not alone in your dislike of shorter stories, and a clearly labeled category for them is an easy fix.

I like reading shorter stories.
I like writing shorter stories.
I've also written three novellas.
Out of all that the shorter ones definitely got more views.
It's pretty impossible to judge what readers want or like because the audience is just too varied.
My advice for trying to attract readers would be to write what you like first and then in the tags highlight the things you like in it.
You've a chance of attracting like minded people to read.

 

[usable001]

The problem is, a story broken into short chapters is not a short story nor flash fiction, so it wouldn't fit in such a category.

Yes, which is why I said at the beginning and repeated at the end of that post that discussing the creation of a short story category needed its own thread. The statement which inspired that train of thought was just a side comment, here.

This post is a topic that deserves its own forum thread, but for the reasons stated in this post below, I don't think I should be the one listed on the OP.

https://forum.literotica.com/threads/forcing-page-breaks.1657176/post-103131436

Edit:
While nothing currently posted here was written with the intention of being excessively short (a second reason this thread is inappropriate), some of the things I have written in the past have been. In addition, Literotica doesn't list word counts on its author pages, like some other sites do.

 

[usable001]

It's pretty impossible to judge what readers want or like because the audience is just too varied.

The short answer is that I didn't say I wanted to "judge what [all, or even most] readers want or like". You are correct; that goal is pretty impossible.

The long answer is a massive speech that includes Howard Moskowitz's work for Prego in 1986 (where he found that a single "best" flavor of spaghetti sauce didn't exist), why Pepsi keeps winning blind taste tests against Coke (even those taste tests proctored by impartial 3rd parties) but still under-sells Coke, and the Blue Ocean Strategy of 2004, where the authors argued that doing the most popular thing (the "red ocean") can actually work against you.

I don't want to attract more views on my stories. Marketing tricks aimed at that specific goal are an easy way to drive your story ratings through the floor. My specific stated marketing goal in the earlier post applies to all of my writing (especially the paid stuff), not just Literotica. With the right feedback, my goals are very attainable. Due to its audience size and chapter-by-chapter rating system, Literotica has been a gold mine for feedback on writing in the short time I have been posting here.

My advice for trying to attract readers would be to write what you like first and then in the tags highlight the things you like in it.
You've a chance of attracting like minded people to read.

I agree, accurate tags are an excellent first step.