Query on bookmarking/listing

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

I’ve read often on this forum that the ideal length for a Lit story is three to five Lit pages (roughly 8k to 18k words). To the extent that I can interpret this, it doesn’t mean that the length, itself, makes the story good, or popular. It’s that if a story of that length is good, readers will finish it, and their votes and comments will be favorable. It may also mean that a story that develops characters, moves them believably through situations, and has enough hot sex arising from the situations, needs that many words for it to be written properly.

To authors who have actual experience with 3-to-5-is-good, I ask: In your well-regarded stories of that length, how much did readers bookmark them? (Or add them to what Lit calls ‘lists’ on the category hubs?) Did this happen more or less often than with stories of other lengths, or stories that are less well-regarded?

https://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=5116173&page=submissions

 

[NotWise]

I have five stories with more than 100 lists/favorites and two of those are in the 3-5 page range. The others are all longer.

There probably isn't a good statistical correlation between length and favorites because there are too many variables, including the reader's reason for listing/favoriting the story, which you can never know.

If I turn around and look at my least favorited stories, then some of those are also in the 3-5 page range, but they're in less-read categories, they're late chapters, or they aren't great stories.

Right after I joined here I started publishing one of my older stories on chapter at a time. The chapters were short--sometimes less that a full page. The story was fairly popular, but the chapter length wasn't. I had a well-stated request from a reader who wanted longer chapters, so they "could get their teeth" into it.

I've always thought of that as the reason to write stories that are at least two full pages--it gives the readers more opportunity to engage in the story.

 

[KeithD]

Hemingway did just fine with 2,000 words. There are very few contests in the mainstream that accept more than 5,000 words. They must think that's enough words to produce a good story. Literotica is its own, unique, environment and there's no universal "I want" Literotica reader. Most of my stories here fall into two Literotica pages, although some are longer and some are only one page. Each time I finished one I thought it was long enough.