Multiple Parts of a story

[Writingmymovie]

I have a long story, perhaps 15,000 words. There are several obvious places to break it up into chapters, published sequentially. What I can't figure out is slightly different. Stories usually extend to several parts for each chapter, numbers say 1 to 5, clicked on at the bottom of each part. Does the AI determine where these breaks are or can I set them?

 

[madelinemasoch]

You mean site pages? There's no AI that determines this. Each site page is, I think, 3,500 words long. I don't believe there's any limit of how long a story can be, but they'll be split into pages of that length no matter how long they are.

 

[THBGato]

No, you have no choice about where the page breaks come.

15,000 words is not particularly long for a single submission by the way. I'm not saying you shouldn't split it into chapters if you want, but at that length there's no real need.

 

[mildlyaroused]

There's no AI to choose the best spots for page breaks. Once I published a story whose entire final Lit page was nothing but the copyright notice ('The End' was even written at the bottom of the second-to-last page), which was a shame. I'm sure it meant a couple less votes and comments, but there's not much to be done about it.

The best you can do is try to prevent your final word count from being a near-multiple of ~3,700. I don't think it's worth it most of the time, though.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I have a long story, perhaps 15,000 words. There are several obvious places to break it up into chapters, published sequentially. What I can't figure out is slightly different. Stories usually extend to several parts for each chapter, numbers say 1 to 5, clicked on at the bottom of each part. Does the AI determine where these breaks are or can I set them?

I'd publish that as a single story - it's around four Lit pages (I use 3750 words as my page metric).

It's not a long story, not by Lit standards.

 

[madelinemasoch]

I'd publish that as a single story - it's around four Lit pages (I use 3750 words as my page metric).

It's not a long story, not by Lit standards.

That's right, it's 3,750.

15,000 exactly is precisely 4 Lit pages.

 

[StillStunned]

I think it's more of a character limit. As far as I can tell, about 19,500 characters (including spaces) per Lit page.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I think it's more of a character limit. As far as I can tell, about 19,500 characters (including spaces) per Lit page.

I'd always figured 20,000 characters, including spaces. It makes sense that each data box would be a round number. On Blogger, for example, a comment has a 4,000 characters limit. Posts, so far as I've seen, are unlimited. Another site (which I no longer go to), the data box was 5,000 characters. A prick of a thing for stories, you had to load page by page. Tedious.

Lit does the whole cabundle for you, and joins the pages up.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

If you're talking about chapters, they're created by the author submitting each chapter as a separate story, just with the later ones called "Same Title ch.2" etc. There is now a way to link stories with separate titles into a series, too.

A 3-4 page story (10-16k words) is probably the most popular length with readers, so I wouldn't split it unless there's one obvious point in the middle.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

I agree with others who recommend that you finish the story, and then submit it as a single published entry.

I can share my experience as an example.

My stories average around 45,000 words, with my longest here being almost 180,000. I originally submitted stories in chapters or parts but reader feedback was overwhelmingly opposed to this. When I resubmitted each of the stories as a single submission and had the chapters/parts removed, comments and scores both improved dramatically.

 

[StillStunned]

I'd always figured 20,000 characters, including spaces. It makes sense that each data box would be a round number.

Sounds about right, with the page cutting off before a new paragraph that would tip it over the limit.

I'm not sure if things like italics and other formatting affect the character count, though.

 

[SimonDoom]

Don't split it up. The story is likely to do better with readers if it's kept as a single story than if split into separately published chapters. For whatever reason, Lit readers tend to like 4 page stories (15,0000 is 4 pages) more than they do 1 or 2 page stories. Your best bet is to keep the whole thing together.