How long is too long?

[HLD]

I am writing a story that right now that is probably going to be 7 separate submissions. Each is about 25-30 pages long in MS Word, which works about to be about four pages here at Literotica, so if I put them all together, we're probably looking at about 25-28 pages total when published online.

How long is too long for a submission here?

When I read some of the longer stories that are published here, I wonder if 7 or more pages of text is too much. At the same time, I wonder if by breaking one story up over several parts, if it dilutes the content of the entire work.

Any comments?

Thanks in advance.

 

[carsonshepherd]

Hey there. This is the way I look at it: this is a free site; I'm not getting paid to write what people want, so I can still write what I want, exactly the way I want. Submit your stories the way you see fit. That way they can speak for themselves. Just the way I look at it.

By the way, I had a story of similar length that was broken up into 6 parts and was my most successful on this site until I pulled it for professional editing.

 

[oggbashan]

Either way is wrong...

You are in a Catch 22 situation.

If you break the story up into separate parts, the later parts are going to get very few readers and votes/comments.

If you keep it as a whole, very few people are going to read to the end and many will be deterred by seeing 15+ Lit pages at the end of the first page.

Reading from a screen is not as comfortable as reading from a book. Very few people have the stamina to read a novel length story from a screen.

If you do break it up, each section has to be written to read as a whole, with a cliff-hanger ending to encourage the reader to move to the next part. That means planning the story as a whole with the appropriate breaks as part of the structure from the start. Each section has to start with a hook, to attract the reader's attention and draw them into the story.

If you leave it as a whole, the Lit page breaks will occur randomly. This is not good for holding the reader's attention. The page break might be in the middle of a chapter. It might occur during boring but necessary description and deter the reader from continuing. It might occur in the middle of a fast action sequence so the motivation for the reader to continue is high.

The answer is that it depends on the structure and plot of your work. If it is conceived and written as a whole, then post it in 'Novels and Novellas' as a whole. If it can be broken down into convenient self-contained parts then that is more likely to attract readers - but they won't necessarily start reading at chapter one...

Og

 

[HLD]

Thanks for your thoughts.

What would you say is the "ideal" maximum length for a single submission here? Four or five pages?

It seems to me that much longer than that and it's easy to lose the reader's attention (I find that happens to me when I'm reading here).

I've noticed that a lot of authors break up their stories into several sections. Do you think this is because they're publishing before they've written the next part or because they want to parse it out into shorter segments?

 

[oggbashan]

Ideal?

It depends on the reader. Many do not read more than one Lit page before switching off.

Some authors treat 'Chapters' as isolated incidents and each is written as an entity with the same characters. That means that the chapter is a separate story and Chapter 10 may be more popular than any other. A story with 35 chapters may not be a novel as most people understand it but more like a soap opera with the sexual activity prominent in each episode.

There are two types of long story on Literotica - the continuous narrative that should be read from beginning to end, and the episodic series of short incidents that are self contained in each chapter.

The easiest way to find out what works is to read the top voted stories in the Novels and Novellas category. What is successful on Literotica may not be what you want to write. That is your decision and your own choice might be popular, or might not. You don't know until you start posting your story(ies).

Og

 

[Varian P]

I've got a ridiculously long story in progress here, of which chapter 12 just posted, and most chapters are 4 lit pages in length. Ultimately, I think the little bugger comes in at about 250k words.

I think Oggbashan's right--if you break the story into multiple chapters, your later chapters won't draw new readers the way an all-in-one story would. When I post a single, separate story, the reads and votes fly past the numbers on the later chapters of my epic.

However, every time I post a new chapter, I seem to get an email from someone saying they peeked at the freshly posted chapter 7, 9, 12, etc., and were drawn in enough by what they saw that they went back and read the story from the beginning.

So if you manage to write a compelling hook for each section, as Oggbashan suggested, you may continue to lure new readers into your longer, multi-part work.

Good luck.

-Varian

 

[drksideofthemoon]

Well...

I don't think length matters...if the story is good, it will hold the reader's attention.

When I first started I shot for 5000 words, then I upped it to 10,000 words, two of my most successful stories Montana Summer Ch 6, and 7 were 15,000 and 20,000 words, the latter being 6 pages on Lit, and the length didn't seem to hurt the readership.

Good luck,

Brian
drksideofthemoon