How long should a novel be?

[K-Anu-Grymm]

Hello!

New here. I've done some snooping around and I know about the suggested word/character length from Tapas themselves, and the desired length of chapters form the community. I'm wondering, though, how long should novels themselves be?

I looked at a few novels to get an idea and I see some have 300+ episodes, and...I can't imagine having 300+ chapters in a novel. Is that normal? Am I missing something here? Is it multiple books combined into the same story? Would 35 episodes be way too short?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you

EDIT: I'm specifically talking about Tapas novels, but thank you!

~K. Anu

[liamnaughton7]

Well regular ole print novels can be any length. 35 chapters seems grand to me. That being said I've only read print stuff and haven't dipped my toes into tapastics novels.

Also a chapter of "The Dice Man" was once a sentence long. Don't know if people would be happy about that kind of thing here but it was hilarious in context.

[Rodimus13]

Hopefully this helps?

[K-Anu-Grymm]

"The Dice Man" was once a sentence long. Don't know if people would be happy about that kind of thing here but it was hilarious in context.

That does sound hilarious. I'm going to look into that

[Wumbl]

It depends really. It's one of those "length of string" questions.

I've written novellas that were between 10,000-30,000 words, while full-length novels are usually something like 70,000-100,000 words and I've never written one of those. The genre and writing style will also affect word-density. YA novels have smaller word counts than, say, cosmic horror stories which are famously very wordy.

Basically, they can be as long as you want. The length of your story should serve the concept, and shouldn't be dictated by a stranger who doesn't know all about your concept.

Also, episodes on Tapas are NOWHERE near the length of a chapter. Episodes on tapas are pages, not chapters.

[K-Anu-Grymm]

Thank you! That's pretty much all I needed to know.

[nostalgicroxas]

Yep, everyone's shouting numbers that I can agree with from reading lots of sources before.

Novellas are stand-alone stories that are 30k-60k, meaning NaNo projects are novella if they're a start to end story. Novels by comparison, usually don't go over 80k on average.

Here's a source of famous books and their approx word counts.
http://commonplacebook.com/art/books/word-count-for-famous-novels/

To be fair, one of my novels is looking at 300k words sooooo hahahah...

[K-Anu-Grymm]

To be fair, one of my novels is looking at 300k words sooooo hahahah...

I have yet to finish a full novel without scrapping the entire thing and editing it to death, so congratulations--that's huge

[Drewbie]

I am posting a novel on Tapas and I am having multiple "books" under one novel. Each one is gonna be around 50k words (Book 1 is currently at that)

[nostalgicroxas]

Yeah this is probably my longest work. I haven't done word counts for all of my others that are finished or mostly done, but some in page count got to 80 pages (8x11 standard) and were pretty interesting before dying. Most stories that I finish, I've attempted to wrap them up and make them be done kind of by taking an axe to them. "YOU SHALL END HERE AND IT SHALL BE CUTE AND IT SHALL END" and then I turn on my heel and walk away because sometimes the worlds are just so big, I could be writing it forever, but the "central characters" so far have lost their luster on me.
The 300k behemoth is only that long because I'm allowing it to be (could've ended it several times, but not satisfy questions), and because I'm making sure to include my favorite kinds of characters and elements. Foreshadowing is a big one for me.

[K-Anu-Grymm]

Thank you much for your answer. Does posting a series in one novel on Tapas have to do with keeping the view count, like on Wattpad?

[Drewbie]

That and subs I think

[Maps]

I’ve got 92 chapters of my novel so far! I technically wouldn’t have that many “chapters” if I meant to write this as print, but Tapas has a character limit of 15,000 for each chapter so you sort of have to cut them off at that point. I wrote my novel on Word before Tapas so I’ve had to learn how to split it up in ways that work for this site... if that makes sense.

[spadesart]

the rough draft of my novel ended at 92,123 and is slowly climbing as i revise it. 90k seems to be your best length for publishing, though.

[K-Anu-Grymm]

I can understand that. The characters make the story exciting. While the world can be explored more, it's not as fun if it's with characters who are done. That's a good way to measure whether or not you feel ready to end a story. Does the 300k work have a name? I might check it out. I enjoy long stories, because then I know that I have time to settle down and learn about the characters.

[K-Anu-Grymm]

This is another thing I was wondering about. It seems a lot of online sites have a word mark they suggest around 1500-2500 words, which for me, is very small. I've been struggling with telling a story in such tiny chapters. I know that means I can simply have more chapters, but it's forcing me to completely rethink the structure and pace.

Do you write normally, and then chop up your chapters and spread them across for Tapas? Or do you edit chapters for Tapas and cut out details, shorten events, etc?

[Maps]

For chapters that exceeded the limit, I usually broke them up into “parts”. So I have some chapters that are 2 or 3 parts.
For example, if the chapter is named “Startled” I’ll post them as “Startled Pt. 1”, “Startled Pt. 2”, “Startled Pt. 3”.
But, now that I am caught up and writing new chapters, I usually just keep them around the length of the character limit. If it exceeds, I just split them up. (I usually write using word still and just copy and paste what I have over. This helps me split the chapters more evenly if I have to break them up into parts, rather than having one full chapter followed by a chapter with one or two paragraphs). But I definitely don’t cut anything out or edit for Tapas. I hope this makes sense lol.

[K-Anu-Grymm]

Awesome The splitting-into-parts thing is a great idea if I ever need to do it. Thank you for answering my questions; it was very helpful.

[nostalgicroxas]

I agree with @Maps about splitting the story into parts. The 300k behemoth I have has parts, not as clear "arc" endings or anything, but "this thing was resolved and it was important, so this is the end of this section". I used that to decide how to end "book 1" for printing and editing I've done.
The monster's NTN. It's not all posted on Tapas yet, getting there, but it is all posted on dA.

[Drewbie]

Harry potter books are usually around 50k and thats what I based my length on so yeah