Remove and readd or just go with it?

[MassiveSchlongOfTerror]

I did a skill issue thing. I have a longer story that I started to write down, then I felt like it'll be too long at 6000 something words (I know, laughable, but I compared it to the minimum 720, having no experience), so I cut it short and pressed publish. While I was waiting for approval of the submission, it occurred to me that I should measure the wordcount of the pages the site cuts the stories into, because I was aiming for ~3-5 pages. But by the time I got back in front of my machine, the story was approved, and now it's out.

So what is the courteous/local thing to do? I suck it up and continue the story with normal length ones, or should I have it removed and repost a longer opening post (I suspect it would grow into multiple chapters)? I want to avoid looking like I'm fishing for a second first impression, but if I thought of measuring before cutting so to say, I would have written the ending a bit differently.

 

[StillStunned]

Leave it as it is, I say. One Lit page is about 3700 words, so your story will be a page and a half. To get to 3-5 pages, you'd have to make it 10-15k words.

Either way, let it be published and see what kind of feedback you get. Then take that on board for your further stories.

Good luck!

 

[Bamagan]

For future reference, each 'Literotica page' is around 3700-3800 words long, although it can vary quite a bit especially if there's lots of HTML markup because of formatting. Some people have said the pages actually have a hard character count limit, not a word limit, as well as programming that tries to cut things off at a paragraph break instead of in the middle of a paragraph.
As for what you should do, I'd recommend just letting the story stand, and if future chapters are longer, so be it. You can have it pulled and replaced with a longer work, but edits to existing works get low priority on the site's daily agenda, so it can sometimes take weeks. And anyway, with serialization being a thing on the site, once you post the complete story, it won't make much difference to the readers if it's three or five or however many chapters, versus that many pages in a single story.

 

[ElectricBlue]

For future reference, each 'Literotica page' is around 3700-3800 words long, although it can vary quite a bit especially if there's lots of HTML markup because of formatting. Some people have said the pages actually have a hard character count limit, not a word limit, as well as programming that tries to cut things off at a paragraph break instead of in the middle of a paragraph.

I reckon there is a maximum bin size for each page - 20,000 characters, from what I can figure out.

I've never yet seen a story that page rolls in the middle of a paragraph, not once.

The worst case of page split that I seen was one of mine - the very last sentence got a page of its own, ffs!

 

[Bamagan]

I reckon there is a maximum bin size for each page - 20,000 characters, from what I can figure out.

I've never yet seen a story that page rolls in the middle of a paragraph, not once.

The worst case of page split that I seen was one of mine - the very last sentence got a page of its own, ffs!

I think I saw a few such back in the early days, when they first switched over to automation from manually dividing longer stories to post as multiple pages. But yeah, their current system seems to work fine at not chopping paragraphs or sentences apart; it no doubt helps that they reject stories that embrace 'wall of text' uber-paragraphs. (Although I'm not personally a fan of going all the way the other direction and making every sentence its own paragraph, unless maybe the story is almost entirely succinct dialogue.)

 

[alohadave]

I reckon there is a maximum bin size for each page - 20,000 characters, from what I can figure out.

I've never yet seen a story that page rolls in the middle of a paragraph, not once.

The worst case of page split that I seen was one of mine - the very last sentence got a page of its own, ffs!

I've seen several like this, with just the last sentence on the second page. I've even seen some that just had The End on the second page. That's always amusing to see.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I've seen several like this, with just the last sentence on the second page. I've even seen some that just had The End on the second page. That's always amusing to see.

When i saw it on mine, I thought, what the fuck? I even went and did an edit, to lose a hundred words so it could all fit on the previous page. But I forgot to put a note to explain why, coz it still rolled over with that single final sentence. So that told me something about the way the story library fits into a database, but I don't know what it told me, nor what it meant. I reread that story the other day, and still thought, god, that's annoying.

 

[StillStunned]

I have one story with five lines on page 3. That's not too bad, unless the reader's internet is really slow, and they have to wait ten minutes for just a few words.