What is your word count per episode?

[BlunderingAlbatross]

Hey everyone, I've just started posting episodes for my new novel (it's here if you want a look) and I'm just curious what the word count per episode is for the rest you writers out there.

Mine is 1000-1300 per episode currently but I'm wondering if that's too little or too much? It's scheduled to update 3 times a week, if that helps.

I look forward to seeing what you have to say

[LadyN]

Well when I used to write constantly my episodes were like 2,000 words. But nowadays they’ve been as long as 1,400 or even less. Depends on what you feel like is long vs short. The average novel length (for children) is at least 12,000 words in all while more adult novels are 60,000 words. Depends on what your target audience is. For a children novel with at least 25 chapters yours is the perfect amount but for an adult one you’d either have to make longest chapters or more of them.

[Berserker]

I'm settling around an average of 1200 words. 1500 seemed a bit too long and less than a 1000 seemed too short.

[DasIstWunderblyat]

The average from six episodes of my novel is 1600 words (rounded). The shortest episode is 415 words which is the prologue, while the longest is 2600 words. I schedule it to update one chapter per week.

Tapas itself in in this guide emphasized on how the platform is for "Bite-sized episodes" and suggested that the ideal first chapter should not exceed 1600 words in length.

I'm actually tend to write longer chapters.

[RainbowCat]

I'm at around 1000 words per chapter now, but I'm trying to reach 1500 for the next ones. I feel likes that an acceptable amount

[queen_of_spades]

Hi...
my episodes are short.
I don't like reading very long episodes - I read while lunch time or coffee breaks and when the episodes are too long, I don't have time to read the whole episode and that is a bummer for me. Tapas is bite-sized, just like Spanish tapas... yum

Delilah, forever | Tapas

Veros | Tapas

[BlunderingAlbatross]

It's more aimed at adults and the chapters themselves are of a decent size and average out at about 14k words. Just wondering how best to split them up for putting them on Tapas

[surenlicious]

Over 15.000 (30.000 / 50.000-ish). I don't follow the bite-sized standard of this website, I drop major chapters because I enjoy that better for my own novel or any story really. As such I have to split my chapters to make them fit, but that's ok.

Jade Kingdoms | Tapas

[rajillustration]

I do 400-600 lol (occasionally up to 1000 if there's a lot of dialogue lines to break the paragraphs, and those haven't published yet so I may still break it up). So, my chapters are like 4-6 episodes each. I just find that it's nice to simulate the turning of a page, and while it's the same amount of words per novel in the end, there's something really fun about turning pages. That and it relieves that eye-strain you can get on a computer to just...refresh the page.

But I just started publishing mine a few weeks ago so I do not know if it's working yet, it's just how I felt like it and what I observed reading other novels on this site.

[BlunderingAlbatross]

Over 15.000 (30.000 / 50.000-ish).

Now tat's big! From what other people have been saying I think I'll keep mine a bit shorter (1500 max).

[LordLacroix]

Normally about 10k characters, not sure about words though. It is rare but I do find myself sometimes exceeding the word count on Tapas.

You can check for yourself if you are interested.

Grotheske | Tapas

[IsoRen]

Around the 2.5K, mostly to keep with the 15K character limit on the website, but I've had oneshots almost 3 times as long
Typically I stick to the limit rather than splitting long episode to not struggle with finding the right cutting off point and having parts that feel too short

[CeeMTaylor]

I wrote my novel off Tapas and find that my scenes organically end up somewhere in the 2k to 4k range. This is pretty large for Tapas, so I try to split them at natural points, which usually means episodes in the 900-1.2k range. My shortest are around 700, my longest are 1.6k. I aim for 1k chunks, but it isn't always possible.

For reference: I'm writing LGBT+ Fantasy for adults. Even though adult readers are used to much longer chapters, shorter episodes work better given the mobile formatting on app, so I stick with Tapas convention instead of genre convention. The bonus of shorter episodes is that you get more episodes out of a single story ... which translates to more views, more visibility, and potentially more $.

If you're interested in taking a gander to see how I organized my story (still ongoing, posting daily), here's the link:

Wicked Waters [Oceana Series] | Tapas

[SaraNGardiner]

I try not to go below 1000. After that, I just pick a good cliffhanger-y or suspenseful moment to end on to keep my readers interested. ^^ So far, I think I'm averaging around 1200.

[silverraven0]

Very much depend. One chapter have it around 2600 words (almost 14000 characters) and the others were a lot lower.

[PizzaPaper]

I usually clock in at around 900 words myself, give or take a few depending on the episode itself, but the average seems to be just under 1000 each time.

[IsobelLynx]

Tapas recommends 500 to 1500 so I try to stay within that range.

Yes, that means I have to split chapters and they don't always have a neat spot to cut off on. My scenes usually run for at least 1500 words. For some of them, I had to write an intro/outro sentence so it would make sense. In other cases, I was like screw it, you want it short, here's short. Figure it out. Essenitally, if someone is binging, it doesn't matter anyway.

I'm toying with an idea of writing a webnovel - one specifically designed for this format - each episode is a fully fledged story like in a sitcom. It's going to be a challenge to write a book in a series of flashfictions, but on the other hand, I do like writing flashfiction so this could be pretty cool.

[Blizzriel]

I typically aim for around 1000 words per episode. This is because I used to read a lot of fanfiction and I learned to determine which links to not even click on from that. Anything that averages less than 1000 words per chapter I take as a sign of lazy writing.

That being said, my chapters tend to be around 3000-4000 words long; I've never actually calculated an average. I just split them into ~1000-word chunks for episodes because of Tapas' whole "bite-sized" deal. My shortest episode is 605 words and my longest is 1.7k.

[surenlicious]

Oh that's fine! I simply am not writing this book to follow the standards set on this website, I intend to publish it so I follow my own path haha.

[Geek_Aflame]

I aim for 1,500 but they can be anywhere between 1,200 and 2,200 words. My chapters are originally longer when I first write them but I split them to publish online. I usually try and cut the chapters at a point that works best for the narrative.

I should mention that the first drafts for both of the stories I'm publishing were complete before I started posting.