What is your preferred chapter length, word-wise?

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Poll ended at Fri Jul 15, 2011 7:24 pm

1-1,000
0
No votes
1-1,000
0
No votes
1,001-5,000
3
8%
1,001-5,000
3
8%
5,001-10,000
10
28%
5,001-10,000
10
28%
10,001-20,000
3
8%
10,001-20,000
3
8%
20,001-40,000
1
3%
20,001-40,000
1
3%
40,001+
0
No votes
40,001+
0
No votes
I don't have a preference.
1
3%
I don't have a preference.
1
3%
No! You can't make me!
0
No votes
No! You can't make me!
0
No votes
 
Total votes : 36

What is your preferred chapter length, word-wise?

Postby Crescent Pulsar R » Fri Mar 25, 2011 7:24 pm

Mine's in the 5,001-10,000 range. The standard length of a novel can be as low as 40,000, and I think it's strange and inconvenient to only have one or two proper stopping spots for that kind of length. On the other hand, I don't care for bite-sized chapters because their content can often be combined into bigger chapters (or they're really lacking in details). It's like people are trying to show off how big their chapters are, or how many chapters they have. I honestly don't get that.
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Re: What is your preferred chapter length, word-wise?

Postby Wyrd » Fri Mar 25, 2011 7:54 pm

Mostly, I dislike under 5k as it often seems abbreviated, but can handle just about any length of chapter. I have been annoyed by the very long chapters when I want to stop reading and finish later, though.
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Re: What is your preferred chapter length, word-wise?

Postby mondu_the_fat » Fri Mar 25, 2011 8:58 pm

For works in progress fanfiction, 6k to 20k, and that's minus the author's notes, which I almost always skip (any questions that pop up that you _have_ to answer in your author's notes but never addressed/answered in the fic? Sign of bad writing). For finished work on the internet, it doesn't matter, although I don't like chapters that take longer to click "next chapter" than to read.

Any shorter, and the author had better be updating on a weekly basis, or some of his other chapters are longish.

Any longer, and the author had better be so good as to keep interested in reading despite being longer than I usually digest (one chapter per sitting).
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Re: What is your preferred chapter length, word-wise?

Postby frice2000 » Fri Mar 25, 2011 9:38 pm

Right around 5k is best in my opinion. Allows for comfortable and plausible reading in one sitting. I have no problems reading longer stories but if you're over 10k a chapter and the story is three or more chapters I'll be transferring the fic to my Kindle more then likely just because it's more convenient to carry and stop at points with. I do wish folks would publish their works major arcs in mobi or ePub or PDF format to make that easier as well. Not that fan fiction downloader, to calibre, to mobi, to kindle or Copy and paste to Word, Print with pdf creator, to calibre, to mobi, to kindle is all that hard.
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Re: What is your preferred chapter length, word-wise?

Postby Spokavriel » Fri Mar 25, 2011 10:29 pm

I like there to be at least 3K and under 150K words. There tends to be some problems requiring reloading to see all the text when its longer.
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Re: What is your preferred chapter length, word-wise?

Postby Shanami » Fri Mar 25, 2011 10:52 pm

mondu_the_fat wrote:(any questions that pop up that you _have_ to answer in your author's notes but never addressed/answered in the fic? Sign of bad writing)..


I agree with that take on author's notes in general, but if the author's notes section is logistical, I find them sometimes worth noting.

As for chapter length, I probably fall into the 5-15k range for both my preferred reading length and for my preferred writing length. However, what matters most is that the chapter splits seem somewhat natural at least, irrespective of length. That said, anything beyond 20k gets cumbersome, and anything less than 5k usually is too short to be satisfying. I seem to not be alone in thinking this.
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Re: What is your preferred chapter length, word-wise?

Postby AshK1980 » Fri Mar 25, 2011 11:12 pm

I usually tend to keep my chapters between 1,100 and 5,000; I have written a few chapters what 7K words, but not too many. Actually I am not really sure how long my first Power of Heroes Chapter was. So yeah, I like to keep mine between 1,100 and 5,000 for the most part.
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Re: What is your preferred chapter length, word-wise?

Postby Crescent Pulsar R » Fri Mar 25, 2011 11:32 pm

Spokavriel wrote: I like there to be at least 3K and under 150K words. There tends to be some problems requiring reloading to see all the text when its longer.
Let' see... A 150K-sized file, for me, would have... between 20,000 and 25,000 words. Closer to the former as is, and closer to the latter if I left out everything that I use for formatting. Sorry, but the file that my current story is in is just about twice that size. XD

Shanami wrote: However, what matters most is that the chapter splits seem somewhat natural at least, irrespective of length.
I agree, though I'm not really trying with my current story. Don't know why... Just one of those whimsical things I do on occasion, that I can't help. <_<;
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Re: What is your preferred chapter length, word-wise?

Postby PCHeintz72 » Sat Mar 26, 2011 12:22 am

Let' see... A 150K-sized file, for me, would have... between 20,000 and 25,000 words. Closer to the former as is, and closer to the latter if I left out everything that I use for formatting. Sorry, but the file that my current story is in is just about twice that size. XD

It should be noted that is highly dependant upon format.

A HTML formatted file can have a high overhead of junk in it. even a fairly clean one can take 10kb+ of that file.

Following average word size rules... 150kb files of pure text in English should yield about 25,600 words.

Some averages...

I can tell you, of all the anime fan fiction I have downloaded in TXT format, average chapter size seems to be floating around 27.20kb, or an estimated word count of ~4600 words a chapter/file.

I can tell you of all the AA episodes I have downloaded in HTML format, average episode size seems to be floating around 7.26kb, or an estimated word count of ~1000 words a episode/file.

EDIT:

I can tell you, of all the anime fan fiction I have downloaded in HTML format not counting AA episodes, average chapter size seems to be floating around 52.25kb. An estimated word count is impossible since the overhead in those files is so variable.
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Re: What is your preferred chapter length, word-wise?

Postby Makoto » Sat Mar 26, 2011 12:34 am

Especially if it's a Microsoft Word-generated HTML file. (OpenOffice does it as well, but I think that's more to maintain parity with MS Word. :roll: )

I'm not sure about fanfiction.net's overhead. I know they do add javascript routines to the pages, but not how much that adds to the pages' size, offhand.
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Re: What is your preferred chapter length, word-wise?

Postby Crescent Pulsar R » Sat Mar 26, 2011 2:43 am

I have a good idea of how many words I write per a certain amount of kilobytes because I make my HTML files from scratch, rather than using a program to make them and format the text for me. That said, the formatting of the pages that I use for my stories takes up 6.55Kb, not including the break tags and the non-breaking spaces around the text when it's written. If I want to find out how many kilobytes that takes up, I simply open the HTML file, copy the text from it, then paste it into wordpad and save it as a TXT document. With my current project as an example, the HTML version is 266KB, and the TXT version is 235Kb. A difference of 31Kb. I could probably drastically reduce that by using a small bit of CSS, but then it wouldn't be in as much of an agreeable format for FF.net... ;/
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Re: What is your preferred chapter length, word-wise?

Postby PCHeintz72 » Sat Mar 26, 2011 3:03 am

Just so it is clear, I did not mean to imply you did not know the size of your own self created files or their overhead. I merely was not going to check several thousand HTML files I have from multiple sources over the years.


As for that overhead in general... A worst case scenario I've come across is one where a 260kb or so file ended up being some 135kb TXT, a nearly 50% overhead.


As for FF.NET overhead, it varies based on when the file was downloaded and its size, as they have changed formats several times over the years.

- A old downloaded story from 2001 was a 43.6kb file, but only 37kb text, so a 6.6kb overhead.
- A newly downloaded story at random was a 51.4kb file, but only 28.9kb text, so a 22.5kb overhead.

That it is higher now is not unexpected, since FF.NET has far more going on in the way of functionality now than it used to, help, dynamic menus, more navigation, advertizing, ect... Note in the case of advertizing, that banner image is not part of the HTML file size count I did.
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Re: What is your preferred chapter length, word-wise?

Postby Crescent Pulsar R » Sat Mar 26, 2011 4:20 am

PCHeintz72 wrote:Just so it is clear, I did not mean to imply you did not know the size of your own self created files or their overhead. I merely was not going to check several thousand HTML files I have from multiple sources over the years.
It was clear enough. It's just that we were still talking about formats and differences in file size and word counts, and I felt like sharing that it's not a mystery for me because of the way that I do things. I know that every 60Kb of text that I write, not counting any of the formatting, guarantees at least ten-thousand words.

On the topic of FF.net's formatting... If I upload HTML files, will it read <br> tags? And will there be any problems with HTML character codes? It's been years since I've uploaded anything there, so I'll have enough fun figuring out how that process works these days.
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Re: What is your preferred chapter length, word-wise?

Postby Ellen Kuhfeld » Sat Mar 26, 2011 8:14 am

I started word-processing with a TRS-80 Model III. Its memory limitations meant I couldn't write chapters more than about 3k words, and I got used to that. For a while I was doing a column where the editors gave me 1k words to play with. That felt rather cramped. Writing, I'm happiest with 3k-8k word chunks, And on FFnet, I got the occasional
complaint of shortness when I only did 4k, but almost never at 8k.
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Re: What is your preferred chapter length, word-wise?

Postby PCHeintz72 » Sat Mar 26, 2011 10:02 am

On the topic of FF.net's formatting... If I upload HTML files, will it read <br> tags? And will there be any problems with HTML character codes? It's been years since I've uploaded anything there, so I'll have enough fun figuring out how that process works these days.

Since I do not actually post there, but read there, I could not say for sure what the best format is myself. But I can say I've had a lot of people state it is better to import Word DOC files than HTML.

Shrugs, fining out for yourself with your actual files would be easiest... simply make the HTML, then convert to word... make a dummy story on FF.NET, and make two chapters, one with the HTML, one with the Word version, and compare the two.

It is almost a pity FF.NET and MM.ORG do not accept BBCode. The advantage there is for authors that have suffered the fustrations of even simple editing looking different between preview threads on forums and the final product on sites like FF.NET and MediaMiner.ORG. Both of which have a long history of screw ups on uploading. Additionally, BBCode as you likely know is a derived but simplified form of HTML, changing between the two is a piece of cake, since to do so one merely needs to change '[' and ']' to '<' and '>'. And their are BBCode preview and editing utilities one can used to see if it is correct and how will look in forums. I use a Java based offline reader called Kyrsoft BBed Offline BBcode Editor
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