Thanks readers! I guess you really like that last chapter of Shadowsblade and Rohanna!
you readers have blown my read numbers higher and faster then any of my stories so far and the kudos rate is COOL!
I am off to write more!
but remember? you can ask questions and maybe make suggestions!
I do listen to them! That is how Violet the pixie was added in more, she was to just be a sidekick and shown sometimes....but now she is a main line character!
have a great day!
Comments
Chapter size
A good story indeed, but posting something so large makes it difficult for many readers to enjoy properly.
Looking at what happened, this could reasonably have been broken into four or more chapters of a more manageable size. In practice, that would make them around 25,000 words which is really still too large for a site like BC.
If you had broken it down, you could have posted one per week which would have given you time to write further chapters. It is useful to build up a buffer if you can, against those "Real Life" obstacles we all suffer from.
The story itself is excellent, of course.
Penny
damned if I do
damned if I do--damned if i don't?
some love small bite chapters...others tell me to stick with the large "flowing" ones.
in the case of shadowsblade. When I write them? they seem to love to be bigger and make more sense?
in the case of Vantier? that one loves small parts in my mind?
Proud member of the Whateley Academy Drow clan/collective
A question of size
Everybody has different ideas of what "small" or "large" means.
Having said that, 100,000 words is definitely too large. To read that most people would take the best part of a day.
Different stories can have different average chapter sizes. Depending on the story flow, it might make sense to have larger chapters or smaller ones. I tried to stick with 6,000 to 9,000 words per chapter when writing Somewhere Else Entirely (141 chapters); this amount turned out to be about a day's worth of happenings.
Your last shadowsblade chapter actually contained about three or four different story arcs so could have been split where those began and ended. Not only would that have made it more manageable for the reader it is more mentally satisfying to read one adventure at a time. There is an overall story so there's no chance of someone not wanting more.
I would also note that Erin suggests that posts be no longer than about 25,000 words, since that makes the files a little more manageable. She does make exceptions, especially for full novels, but even those don't usually run to more than about 40,000 words.
Remember, every time someone wants to read one of your chapters they have to download the whole page even if they don't read it all at once. That might not matter if they have fast broadband but for mobile readers the charges can soon mount up.
Penny