Long Story vs Chapters

[frisky-leo]

In the process of life (most recently finishing college, starting and settling into a new job, and moving) I've had a couple of my stories evolve into elaborate tales as I've been playing with them when time permits.

So with that in mind, I have a format question for any editors/authors/readers that would care to throw their opinion out there.
Would you rather read a longer story as one full posting, or do you prefer to see it published in chapters?

A comparison: My story Hidden Woods Camp https://www.literotica.com/s/hidden-woods-camp is roughly 9.5K words, and one of the new stories is around 20K words.

Thank you in advance.

~FL

 

[Darkniciad]

A little copy-paste from discussing this subject in another forum section.

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The only real advantage to releasing something big as a single submission is the likelihood that your score will be higher than most of the chapters will generate.

You get more exposure by breaking it up into chapters and releasing them on a regular schedule. There's been a reasonably consistent 2 days from submission to approval lag for quite some time now, so you can time it fairly well.

Wait until each chapter is approved before submitting the next, and try to avoid Sunday releases, because they suck.

Every time you release a new chapter, you put your name and your work in front of new people. Releasing it as one big submission only gets you one shot at catching people's eyes.

The views, votes, etc. are likely to diminish with each chapter. The score will typically rise the farther you go along. That's a product of the people who enjoy it sticking with it, while those who aren't as enamored don't open the next chapter. It's the same reason really long submissions score higher, but spread out over multiple submission.

Try to keep the chapters at least 6000 words or more, if possible. If you've broken something up into chapters already, and they're well short of this, you can always post multiple chapters per submission. ( My Story Ch. 01-03 for the title line, for example )

The readership tends to frown on chapters that don't go a decent distance into a second Lit page. Once you break beyond 3 Lit pages, some of the convenience of an easy stopping point for readers fades away, so between the two is your sweet spot.

 

[frisky-leo]

Thank you very much.