Chapter lengths and reader satisfaction

When I started releasing The Bloodlet Sun in earnest last September, I had no idea what I was doing. I still generally have no idea, but I have learned some lessons on the way. I always argue that no time spent writing is a waste of time, because even your worst work will teach you something that you will use in your best work. Not to say that The Bloodlet Sun is in that “worst” category, just that any mistake is a lesson in disguise. And the lesson of the day is chapter lengths.

From what I’ve seen of writing forums, this is actually a very common question – how long should my chapters be? Most experienced authors give the same advice – it doesn’t really matter. Sometimes chapter boundaries mark perspective shifts, sometimes they offer breaks in the narrative, sometimes they allow for intermediary passage of time, and sometimes they offer an opportunity to leave the reader with a cliffhanger (an apparent requirement in Dan Brown books, which, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy). In short, there are no rules when it comes to chapters, and some books have none at all.

It’s not quite the Wild West of chapter lengths in the context of serially released web novels.

I went into The Bloodlet Sun with two considerations in mind – don’t make chapters too short (which was arbitrarily set at a floor of 800 words) and don’t eat up too many words out of the buffer. This is a good start, but recently I’ve been encountering some serious reader issues with this approach. After ending up with two hard paragraph breaks within a single 900ish word stretch, I knew I couldn’t continue this way. I imagined being a reader going through a scene that ends mid-way. Fine, it happens. But then next week I discover that the scene only had two paragraphs left in it, the narration switching to another location for five paragraphs, and then providing the first two paragraphs of the next scene before cutting out again.

I wouldn’t blame anyone for rage quitting at the end of that chapter, so it’s up to me to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

The simple solution of course would have been to edit that chapter down to a single hard paragraph break. Easy in theory, but practically speaking, would have needed for one chapter to either be around 500 words long or another chapter needing to be extra-long, which meant eating into my precious buffer. The first option was a non-starter. My segments (or chapters) that I release are already scraping the bottom of what’s acceptable for length for web serials, especially one that gets released only once a week.800 words should be the absolute minimum and even then I’m trying to raise this to 1,000.

So this leaves only my buffer, and that’s the hard lesson I had to learn. Quality and consistency go hand-in-hand. As someone who had previous problems with consistency I was too focused on this as the one problem I needed to solve. No one is going to care how consistent my updates are if there’s nothing to look forward to in my updates, and this is precisely the kind of thing that could turn readers off.

I’ve made a new pledge. To worry less about my buffer and more about proper flow between my updates. For this reason, starting with Chapter 6 of The Bloodlet Sun, there may be increased variation in the length of my updates, but now the breaks will follow the narrative more closely, and won’t be as jarring as they sometimes are.

Hopefully this means happier readers and therefore more readers.