I try for around 1k. Often my first chapter will be a little shorter as I try for a more dramatic punch with less exposition so the story will unfold. As a reader if a novel's first chapter goes on like my old aunt Betty prattling on and on I don't read more of it. It seems like too much filler.
All that said, however, I really favor a "natural" break. Sometimes if you've only got about 500 words but everything feels complete, then do that. We've all read something where we've paged ahead waiting for the point. And, we've all read something that was longer but was so well put together we didn't notice the length.
Write hard, write true.
I usually try to keep it at 5 to 7 panels an update, but it really depends on where a moment stops and starts. I wouldn't want the episode to end on something that feels like a cut off sentence, but I also want to leave the end of the page at a place where what happens next is interesting enough to get someone to come back. Sometimes I'll do more panels if I feel like it needs a bit more.
When I started out the number of panels varied based on what kind of story I was trying to tell in that update. Recently I’ve transitioned to trying to keep as close as possible to 4 panels per update because it makes it a lot easier to format for sharing on social media. Tapas and webtoon only draw In people who are really into webcomics. Most people who read webcomics seem to encounter them through places like Instagram or Reddit. Having flexibility in my formatting so that I can post a scrollable form here and a more traditional version elsewhere has really helped increase my audience a lot.
An episode of mine that may get 25 views and 10 likes on Tapas will easily get 300-400 upvotes on Reddit for example.
TreasureHUNT!! operated on mostly page-a-week updates, so I think the average panel count was around... 5-6 probably?
The comic I'm working on now... it's kinda too early to tell lol. It's vertical scroll format, but the length also fluctuates a lot based on the episode content. Like, the premise is that it's a slice of life based on a D&D campaign I'm currently playing, so some episodes are pretty quick if it's just telling a single joke or scene, but some are more plot heavy and thus lend themselves to longer strips.
I think the shortest so far is like 12 and the longest is 36? So maybe average of 20 panels? xD
For me it was more about making one complete thought than trying to fit in a cap. For long form it can be anywhere between 10 and 40+ panels. But, for my page format one, I just did one page a week. On Webtoon however-- for that same comic I upload those pages 5-6 pages at a time per episode. So I think Webtoon likes longer episodes and will wait much longer for them. Tapas, they're cool with short snippets if they get more updates more often.
Overall, it's just...however long it takes to say a thing I need for that update.
For Tapas purposes I've been trying to break my novel chapters up to be no more than 2k word episodes. It has been no easy feet let me tell you LOL I gave up trying to find a good stopping point in the chapters, because they just don't exist, so instead I take the total word count of my chapters and divide by 2 or 3 until I get it into that 2k sweet spot.
In general, my chapters are as long or as short as they need to be to convey the scene I'm trying to play out during it. I've had them range from a couple hundred words up to 10k words, though 10k is admittedly a bit too long.
I won't be posting that book to Tapas because I'd probably die if I tried to break those chapters up into Tapas friendly bits , but yeah I have a book with a chapter that has 10K words in it. It was one of my first books so I've gotten a bit better at cutting down some of the excessive fluff that 'caused it to get that long. I'd say of my newer works I usually hover around 4-6k words at their longest, usually depends on if the chapter needs more descriptive bits. I'm a fantasy writer so there are times when I need to spend more time describing something vs a chapter that might have more dialogue to it.
On average I post a page per episode. That's around six panels lmao. I think that each character gets around 3 sentences when they're talking. I think it's a bit short, so when I finish the first chapter I think it will be a good idea to upload all of the pages at once so the reading experience will be more fluid.
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