Story Suggestion/Help

Hey everyone!

So this blog is focused entirely on your (the readers!) preferences in a story on here. Specifically, I'm wondering about the preferred chapter length.

So far for my upcoming story, I have a prologue and two chapters written (though very roughly). The prologue is fairly short (~275 words), and the two chapters are around 2,000 words each. While the prologue probably won't change much in length, I'm wondering about the length of the first two chapters, because of the content in them.

Honestly, if I were to publish this some day, I would probably put the first two chapters together. The content in them is in the same night, so it wouldn't be hard to just continue the first chapter with the content of the second chapter. Not to mention, most published novels have fairly long chapters so that wouldn't be a problem at all.

That being said, this is Mibba. There is a couple problems I see with putting the two chapters together. First of all, they are 2,000 words a piece in their unedited state. I already have notes throughout both chapters where I should add things. Thus, when they have been looked over and rewritten a bit, they could easily get up to 3,000 words a piece: putting them together would make for a 6,000 word chapter. Which, granted, isn't a bad thing; however, as a story on Mibba, I feel like having long chapters right off that bat can turn off some readers because they just want a quick taste of what the story is about. Not a huge block of text that will taken them at least a half hour or an hour to read.

Also, if I kept the chapter around 2,000 words a piece, then I can get chapters written and posted faster and more on a schedule... 6,000 word chapters would take much, much longer to write from here on out.

But would it be weird to keep them separate, because they're so related? Ugh, I just don't know.

What's your preference?
June 15th, 2015 at 01:29am