Longer chapters vs. shorter chapters

[lilithfairenwrites]

I'm wondering if there's any folks here who've had a novel with longer chapters that didn't get much traction, but then they reformatted the chapters into smaller pieces and managed to get more readers then.

Just wondering, because my current novels have chapters that can reach 3,000+ words in length, and I'm wondering if splitting them into two episodes each might not be short enough to fit Tapas's niche.

Thanks for answering.

[Berserker]

1500 words is a pretty good length. I think anywhere from 1000-1500 works well with the format.

[Geek_Aflame]

I've been wondering if I should split up my chapters because some people have complained about the length. The biggest thing stopping me is the inability to reorder episodes on Tapas.

[Penni]

I've never had anyone complain about the length of my chapters one way or another. I tend to keep mine between 1200-1500 words.

But I've seen some longer and shorter than that. You'll probably get a lot of varied answers from readers, so just do whatever you feel is best for you.

[Shredder]

I think it may largely depend on the type of story you're writing, and what your general writing style is and how well you draw the reader into the story.

An action story with very short and brief chapters would become very tedious quickly as you're always waiting for the next chapter, however a slower paced slice of life story may benefit from it.

[ToxicRamen]

Even though I haven't started on them yet, but I figure it would be easier for me to do short chapters for one of my webcomics while other one is a comic strip. It's sorta because I used to read comics that had self contained stories in 1-2 chapters growing up, so I wanted to do that with my comics.

[Dysis]

Yes!! Tapas is a bite sized novel site. People here are more visuals oriented than reading oriented, evident from their preferences in comics. It's faster to finish a comic than read a novel.

They prefer chapters they can easily finish standing in a corner waiting for a bus or something along those lines. Although I haven't done the cut short experiment, I have first hand seen that a story with its first chapter ending in 500-800 word limit not only attracts more people, it makes people want to flip pages and avoid reader burnout. It increases your chances to be showcased on the front pages as well.

[WolfUnderTheMoon89]

I started off with keeping the original lenght. But at some point the character limit came up and the parts were too big. So after chapter 30, I started splitting them up and made a note about it
I just wished I coule redo the start

[Tamaki_Leon]

In all honesty, in my general view of things, the length of one's chapter depends on where you write your book on.

On Tapas, Webnovel and other publishing platforms, short chapters are preferred 1k to 2k.

On Amazon? Long chapters would be perfect for here.

There's no flaw in writing Longer Chapters, however, the fact is that you have to understand that we are on the internet, and the majority of your general readers wouldn't want to read something which is very long. Why so? In the first place, they are looking for something they can consume in a short time and enjoy while doing something else. If you want longer chapters, most readers won't go searching on the internet, rather they'd go to a book store and pick up a book to read those type of length. That's the general difference of things.

And with long chapter, you would make your readers feel rather tired, no breathers and the like, they might drop the book as a whole due to the very factor of the chapters being long. "Why should I read something this long?" The readers usual think this way and drop it, and thus picking up another book. The consensus is that people just prefer light reading rather than heavy reading when looking for online publishing novels/book.

1k to 2k words is a good length to write in, any more than that would rather be too daunting. This thing also applies to text with a lot of paragraphs in it, sometimes breaking them up will allow your readers to have an easier time to read, as I've said, readers on the internet tend to be on the casual side of things, they want easier to consume stuff rather than daunting stuff.

If you would like I can share with you this article I've found which helps:

Writers: Why Chapter Length Matters More than You Think

[mx_Jinn]

I think it generally varies. I haven’t really seen any chapters longer than 1500 words, and I tend to write words between 800-1200 for chapters for my own novels. If I find myself hitting over 1200 I tend to split the chapter in half since when I come back to edit it, I’ll have about 900-1000 words ready to post.

[NellieVP318]

I have a couple long chapters. When I started here, I split my chapter to wherever the best place to split it off. Sometimes the split chapters range around 1,000 or around 2,500 area. I do a quick read through to find where I can put it as a two-partner. Sometimes, if it calls for it, I change the chapter to make its own chapter, especially in my rough draft. A lot of the characters' POVs shared a chapter. So I started spitting up for better story pacing.

[Van]

I think it mostly depends on the kind of story, feel and readers you have
Some people prefer one big chunk (10,000+) some prefer a simple meal (5,000+) some just like something quick on the go (2,000+)
Really it depends on how many plot points you want to include in the chapter

[spadesart]

When I had my rough draft of my novel up on tapas, I had to split some chapters into 8+ parts since they got so long. I wouldn't worry too much about the overall length of chapters, just keep them as long or short as they need to be. My readers seemed fine with me splitting up the long ones.

[domisotto]

It’s not the length of your chapter, it’s the episode. I find that editing and everything is easier on the small, 1K bits. I went with 1K goal to start with, and it works well for my first book. Not exceptionally, but well. I am curious to see how my second book does, that targets 800-1K words per chapter.

[nostalgicroxas]

I can firmly state that NTN's chapters were longer 1000+ words. And they have that pattern for the first 20+ updates/chapters on this site, with few to none requiring more than 1 update to finish a chapter.
The spin-off has strictly 500 (at most 700) words per update from the get-go and in 6months has larger stat growth in views/subs than NTN had, and still has.
To the point of if I were to not upload any updates at all for the spin-off for the next year, there still is a 95% chance that by Halloween this year, it'll surpass NTN's subs and views per month.

I've never had anyone complain about my longer uploads. I've just witnessed that shorter gets more attention.
NTN updates twice a week, just had the last few chapters switch to once a week.
Spin-off updates twice a month.

I don't know WHY they have such a large difference between the two, but it exists, and one of the easiest firm stats to look at is update length. Shorter = more eyes on it. For some reason.

The real pain is that if I wanted to adjust NTN to have shorter updates, I'd have to manually go in and cut up the chapters, and paste them into later ones, without uploading new ones. Because the current system doesn't allow one to just.... squeeze in something between existing updates. It's that, which would've been easier months ago, or delete ALL of the contents, and start uploading again from scratch. But then, do I upload them all at once, a few a day, or the same pace, until we're caught back up to the current chapter (76)? Lol It's just such a headache that's got no easy solution.