Is It Possible? Is it allowed?

[JC_WELLS]

I, m working on this series (that's a part of a universe of different series) and I am thinking of writing the entire first book before publishing here. If I take this route, I want to post the whole first book as one part of the series instead of breaking it up into multiple chapter entries. It would probably be around 20-22 chapters (give or take) with around 2,500 to 3,500 words per chapter. Is this possible and/or allowed or do I have to break it up in different entries?

Sorry if wrong place. I'm horrible at figuring out where to put questions.

 

[Djmac1031]

Right place. And absolutely possible.

 

[alohadave]

I, m working on this series (that's a part of a universe of different series) and I am thinking of writing the entire first book before publishing here. If I take this route, I want to post the whole first book as one part of the series instead of breaking it up into multiple chapter entries. It would probably be around 20-22 chapters (give or take) with around 2,500 to 3,500 words per chapter. Is this possible and/or allowed or do I have to break it up in different entries?

Sorry if wrong place. I'm horrible at figuring out where to put questions.

77,000 words might be a little intimidating to readers as one story. Speaking only for myself, unless I already knew your writing, I probably wouldn't touch something that big. That said, there is no length rule here, and it can be published as a single story.

Other authors who have posted stories that long can comment about the approval time, but I'd imagine that it'd take longer than normal for Laurel to review it as one piece.

 

[JC_WELLS]

Thanks for responding! Yeah, I probably won't write THAT many chapters, but it definitely won't exceed it so I put it there as an approximate number of maximum chapter/words

 

[Voboy]

Hmmm. I have no doubt that 60-70k words would find an audience here. But it certainly wouldn't be me; my sweet spot as a reader is closer to 20k or so. You're likely going to be limiting your readership somewhat. The good news is that scores would likely be quite high, with lower views as the tradeoff.

I MOST ASSUREDLY would not post as 20 chapters of c. 3k words each, lol. Maybe a happy medium? Three "volumes" of perhaps 6-8 chapters each? The key would be to keep each of those as self-contained as possible.

I'm not sure any of your options is "bad," per se. You can do any of them. But there'll be pros and cons for each.

 

[Djmac1031]

There are two ways to look at it, neither of them wrong.

On the one hand, as @alohadave says, a very long story may intimidate some readers who simply don't wanna invest that much time.

On the other hand, posting as a series may draw you a good audience early on, but you'll lose many as it progresses.

That said: if it's FINISHED, and you know how many chapters it will be, you can inform readers in chapter one that you'll be publishing a new chapter regularly, say once a week or whatever.

That may help them stick around, knowing they'll get regular, shorter sections to read.

 

[SeraphNocturne]

I'm pushing a series with 150K words total over... seventeen chapters, with I'm guessing 20-30 regular readers based on the rating averages in the last four months. If the story picks up a decent following, it's totally doable and quite rewarding. I will say that going ahead and writing the entire thing out before you begin publishing is very wise... I wish I had done that, because if you get yourself a little following of readers it's rough having them wait on you to get around to putting out the next installment.

Best of luck with it JC.

 

[RejectReality]

There's no functional upper limit. I'm sure that somewhere there's a technical limitation that might make it impossible to go beyond a certain number of megabytes, but nobody has found it yet, and there are some goddamn long-assed single submission stories on here.

https://www.literotica.com/s/threads-the-island

42 Lit pages for the first example that comes to mind.

Now, as to whether it's better to break it up or make it a single submission, there are all sorts of arguments for and against both options. IMO the #1 determining factor is whether you wrote it as a single work, or whether you wrote it with the idea of it being broken up. Typically, second-guessing your original intention is a bad idea.

The second thing to look at is the category where it will be. If you look at a category like Sci-Fi&Fantasy, you don't see a great deal of difference between single submission works and Ch. 01 of a chapter story. Look at Incest and you'll see that there's far less interest there. Have a look and see if the readership is supportive of chapter works.

Beyond that, I don't honestly think there's much difference so long as you have a finished story that you post as consistently as the Lit queue will allow. The one exception is that there are so many unfinished chapter stories here that a lot of people won't even start one that they don't know is already finished. That stigma isn't there when it's a single submission. If they're willing to read a long story, there's already something going in your favor by posting it complete from day 1.

 

[AchtungNight]

Break it up into chapters, at least one hot sex scene in each, and yes, it’s very workable. Bluedragon and Nick Scipio are the best online adult writers I know at doing such work. Some of their stories are on this site, others are elsewhere and in print.

 

[JC_WELLS]

Thanks everyone for responding! I think I'll do it in a single submission with (possibly) around 12-14 chapters within each book. (Also, each submission is one book in the series for reference)

 

[TarnishedPenny]

I would refer you to Hammingbyrd67’s The Preacher Man. https://literotica.com/s/the-preacher-man 162,000 words spread over 46 pages. 611,000 views and a score of 4.90.

Cards read - do it right and you can do anything.

Good luck.

 

[ElectricBlue]

My suggestion, as a new writer, would be to publish a story that long in maybe nine or ten chapters.

2k - 3k words is less than one Lit page (I use 3750 words as my metric), and there's a general consensus that 2 - 4 Lit pages (that's 7k - 14k) is a sweet spot for chaptered stories.

If you submitted them all at the same time, you can ask Laurel to release a chapter every day (or 2nd day, 3rd day, whatever). That way, the story will stay on the category front page for quite a while - depending on category, obviously).

If you do it that way, be sure you're not going to get any content policy rejections (because a rejection could cock up the chapter release order, while you fix it).

The alternative is to release it as one long story - the downside of that is, you're a new writer with no following yet, and there are folk who simply won't read long stories. But if you draw them in with regular chapters, you get both "I like short reads" readers and "I don't mind long reads" readers, so you get both.

As a BTW, the longest single story I've seen here was over eighty Lit pages, about 280,000 words. It's been taken down since, and published commercially.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

A lot depends on the category the story fits in. I have several stories over 100K with minimal to no sexual activity that have done well here. All are posted in Novels/Novellas and have red H's.

The belief that Literotica is exclusively for porn stories under 10K words is a fallacy perpetuated by those who only write smut stories. There is an audience for more here, though not as large as on someplace like Goodreads.

 

[JC_WELLS]

I plan on actually publishing this series at some point and am only using this as a starting place for it. It's a fantasy genre series so that's where I'd place it. I suppose I could do it in a way where each submission has like two or three or so chapters and then continues in a separate submission. Actually, yeah I like that idea. Maybe I'll do it that way instead. Anyways thanks to everyone for giving your advice! I appreciate it!

 

[JC_WELLS]

Oh and it will have sex scenes and adult themes, it's just not purely a porn story/series.

 

[JC_WELLS]

I-I'm sorry? I mean I do have a piece up already but I'm confused...

 

[JC_WELLS]

Have I done something that warrants getting banned? I didn't think I did but, could be wrong...

 

[RejectReality]

Have I done something that warrants getting banned? I didn't think I did but, could be wrong...

A perennial hobby that seems to pop up frequently hereabouts is doppelganger sleuthing. Far more common on the General Board, but we have our fair share of it here as well. Someone is annoyed by someone else, and they immediately begin hunting for sock puppets they believe are part of the other person's doppelganger army of alts. It appears someone believes you're an alt for the poster who started the thread about "well, I'll be banned soon".

Try not to take it too personally. They don't have anything against you. They think you're someone else they have a problem with. If it reaches the level of harassment, report the posts to the Mod, but it probably won't.
This sort of stuff usually dies off pretty quickly, as most of the guesses are extremely circumstantial, ( and wrong ) which becomes obvious in short order.

 

[JC_WELLS]

A perennial hobby that seems to pop up frequently hereabouts is doppelganger sleuthing. Far more common on the General Board, but we have our fair share of it here as well. Someone is annoyed by someone else, and they immediately begin hunting for sock puppets they believe are part of the other person's doppelganger army of alts. It appears someone believes you're an alt for the poster who started the thread about "well, I'll be banned soon".

Try not to take it too personally. They don't have anything against you. They think you're someone else they have a problem with. If it reaches the level of harassment, report the posts to the Mod, but it probably won't.
This sort of stuff usually dies off pretty quickly, as most of the guesses are extremely circumstantial, ( and wrong ) which becomes obvious in short order.

Oh. Well, thanks for informing me. Glad it's nothing I did.

 

[Altissimus]

Oh. Well, thanks for informing me. Glad it's nothing I did.

My mistake. Comes from posting at 4am when I have insomnia. Original reply removed.

 

[oneagainst]

I'm pushing a series with 150K words total over... seventeen chapters, with I'm guessing 20-30 regular readers based on the rating averages in the last four months. If the story picks up a decent following, it's totally doable and quite rewarding. I will say that going ahead and writing the entire thing out before you begin publishing is very wise... I wish I had done that, because if you get yourself a little following of readers it's rough having them wait on you to get around to putting out the next installment.

My 2c as both a reader and writer... 120k words should break up naturally into chapters - maybe 10 to 20 - so I'd publish like that. Write it all first, get it in the torpedo tube, and then publish a chapter every few days to keep the ball rolling. You'll garner the readers who would go up to max 4 pages, and you won't lose the readers who would quite happily do 30 pages at once, so it's win-win. Personally, my view is that it's just polite to break up and publish in chapters so the reader can "put the bookmark in" and come back by marking ch in their lists. I see readers doing that with my stuff, and I do the same when reading... who's got 6h to sit down in a block?

 

[BobbyBrandt]

My 2c as both a reader and writer... 120k words should break up naturally into chapters - maybe 10 to 20 - so I'd publish like that. Write it all first, get it in the torpedo tube, and then publish a chapter every few days to keep the ball rolling. You'll garner the readers who would go up to max 4 pages, and you won't lose the readers who would quite happily do 30 pages at once, so it's win-win. Personally, my view is that it's just polite to break up and publish in chapters so the reader can "put the bookmark in" and come back by marking ch in their lists. I see readers doing that with my stuff, and I do the same when reading... who's got 6h to sit down in a block?

This is the only site where I ever broke my longer stories up into chapters, and the overwhelming response from readers was that they preferred single submissions. That is why I have gone back and requested that all my chapter stories get replaced with a single submission. The feedback so far from readers to these changes has been entirely positive.

Now, I differ from a lot of authors here by not submitting any part of a story until it is complete. Incomplete stories naturally lend themselves to chapter or partial submissions, and I understand that. I just don't view it as the best or most organized way to tell a tale, and as a reader, I never start a story that is obviously unfinished.

For the most part, my loyal followers and other readers attracted to my longer stories are not here simply to make their hands sticky. They are here for the "Lit" part of the site, hopefully with some erotica thrown in occasionally. If I posted these stories in "Erotic Couplings", or one of the kink categories they would likely bomb. Readers go to Novels/Novellas with different expectations and my stories meet those.

 

[SeraphNocturne]

My 2c as both a reader and writer... 120k words should break up naturally into chapters - maybe 10 to 20 - so I'd publish like that. Write it all first, get it in the torpedo tube, and then publish a chapter every few days to keep the ball rolling. You'll garner the readers who would go up to max 4 pages, and you won't lose the readers who would quite happily do 30 pages at once, so it's win-win. Personally, my view is that it's just polite to break up and publish in chapters so the reader can "put the bookmark in" and come back by marking ch in their lists. I see readers doing that with my stuff, and I do the same when reading... who's got 6h to sit down in a block?

Very sound advice, thank you love.

I’m always afraid of going to like 30K, because I feel like nobody is going to read that in one sitting… though apparently there are some crazy people who will sit and go through 40 Lit pages out there. So maybe I’ve been overthinking it.

When I republished the series for compensation, I’ve done so in Volumes of 5 chapters per, roughly 10K words per chapter so about 50K per volume, and it’s sold extremely well just within the fan base.

I think going forward I’m definitely writing out series stories in full before publishing and I’ll try your method out! Frankly after the series I’m working on wraps up, I’ll be happy to do some shorter works for a bit.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Both my stories, Written in Blood and The Case of the Richman's Wife, are multi-chapter stories and were published all at one time. So, allowed and possible. One was for the Halloween competition, and the other was for the Mickey Spillane event. I'll leave it to you guys to figure out which was for what.

 

[MelissaBaby]

My longest single submission is 71k, 20 Lit pages.

From my experience, when you publish very long stories, you tend to get fewer views but higher scores.