How long is long?

[beccaelizabeth]

I just saw someone refer to 4200 words as a long chapter

they post in their LJ one chapter at a time

I'm waiting until my story is all finished before I post (because I have this tendency to go back and start over, or change things that happened several acts ago)

but when I do I was going to post in parts rather than just put an announcement up

because for some reason that seems to get more readers
(I do not know why)


And also because I don't think you even can put 30,000 words in an LJ post
and if you did the emails you get for the comments would be
HUGE

ANYways

what size is a good size for a part?
how long is long?

my smallest section is the teaser at 1300ish
but the next smallest is about 5000
and act 3 is... bigger.
I may have to play with the act breaks a bit.

But anyways, thoughts?

Comments

[janedavitt.livejournal.com]

Parts are better IMO because not everyone has time to sit and read 30K in one go. And really, anything goes... when there's been no good place to break, I've had chapters of 7,000 but I generally aim for 2-3,000 as that's long enough to get people into the fic, not so long that they have to break off to do somethign else.

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

Personally I prefer to read things all in one go because I print them out and take them places with me. Also I like to know a story is going to end before I commit. But I know a lot of people seem to like chapters these days.

4000 is probably an average novel chapter for my current thing, but different stories end themselves to different points at which to break off.

Gina

[treacle-a.livejournal.com]

Just browsing friends' friends :)

If you have the fic all done, I'd post it in instalments of 3000 words or so. As Jane says, 3k is a good length for a fic chapter (although mine usually tend to run between 3500-5000). I'm not sure why people enjoy reading fic in chapters, maybe it's the nature of the web: bitesize chunks rather than a 4 hour fic-reading marathon ;)

[julia-here.livejournal.com]

(sigh)

At least I know I'm someone. (Tease, be, not sarcasm or wallop)

The story I'm working on is Victorian in setting and feeling; the serial publication is at least partly to hold to that feeling. The reason I remarked on the chapter length was that it was about a thousand words more than the moving average of the last ten chapters, and over twice the length of the shortest chapter in the story. The 2500-3500 word length is just what the rhythm of the story seems to require.

I've been keeping track of chapter lengths on serialized WIPs after the larger offspring made fun of me for how short my chapters are. Some of them run under a thousand words, which feels unsatisfying to me, and some of them are as long as 7,000 which, being a glutton, I love. More than that starts to interfere with real life (or maybe real life interferes with reading?); I either have to stop reading and go do something else, the phone rings, or something comes up which derails my concentration.

Julia, it really comes down to the whole "rhythm of the story" thing, I'm pretty sure.