Breaking Up a Long Story

My next story is coming in at 10,000 words. Story action takes place over a couple of weeks. Logically it's 12 segments varying between 800 and 1200 words; I can group those reasonably into four chapters of roughly 2500 words each.

What is the preference of Lush management? What would be the preference of most readers?

As a reader, I prefer 4 at 2500 (or two at 5,000).

800-1200 too short for a 10K, imo

I was in a similar situation with Paris Bares All coming in just over 9000 words and split it into two parts. However, it took place over two days so there was a natural breakpoint. Which is probably as important as how many chapters or how long. Are there natural breaks in the flow of the story where you can split it?

But I am generally with Kimmi. You don't want a lot of short parts. Too choppy. It's actually hard to get readers to go past the first chapter of a series as it is. So fewer, longer parts is better.

I'm finding submitting in shorter form is hard because of wait time between approval. I have 3 chapters ready, averaging 2000+ words. Going take a month to get 3 approved. Rethinking of combining them for faster publishing.

I am struggling with this right now, but for different reasons.

I am leaning on just going with close to the max 10,000 words. While I could break the story up, I am struggling to find good break points where I don’t lose momentum.

Part of my conundrum is the nature of my story. I am swerving outside of my comfort zone and going with a futa transformation story. My concern is that if a reader comes into the story in chapter two or three, they are going to be really confused and just walk away, even I start with a brief synopsis.

Worst case, the story is not well received and lesson learned.

Quote by paddlingincognito
My concern is that if a reader comes into the story in chapter two or three, they are going to be really confused and just walk away, even I start with a brief synopsis.

The trick is to have moments in the subsequent chapters that let you clue people in without doing "info dumps". It's not easy but adding mentions like "that reminded her of (thing that happened in chapter 1)" and that sort of thing. Slip in flashbacks and that sort of thing, too. But, yeah, that's definitely a problem with breaking a longer story into parts vs. writing in parts to start with. In an actual novel (e- or print) it doesn't matter but with the serial nature of publishing on Lush, it becomes a problem.

In Paris Bares All, the lengthy flashback revealing what happened to her failed engagement is in part 1, the recapitulation to get a new character up to date is a bit of dialogue in part 2, which then also gets readers who skipped on 1 up to date.

Quote by Pauline53

I'm finding submitting in shorter form is hard because of wait time between approval. I have 3 chapters ready, averaging 2000+ words. Going take a month to get 3 approved. Rethinking of combining them for faster publishing.

Spreading them out might actually help. People tend to read chapters as standalones anyhow in my experience so not sure there's a lot of benefit to having them go up close together. Many will read part 1 and never get to later parts.

In the case of the two-parter I mention above, part 1 has about 700 more views than part 2 and significantly more likes and comments even though they went up only 6 days apart this past July. It's weird because most of the hot sexy stuff is in part 2. Part 1 ends with sex but has a lot of plot and character development otherwise.

I had a series under my old profile where the chapters were all over the map. I think the first and fourth had the most views but the ones in between were lower. So part four clearly caught attention from people who had not read the earlier parts (that part was a former bride exploring her sexuality after leaving her groom at the altar) That was spread out over a longer period, though, since it was actually written as a series.

This poll might provide some context from a reader perspective.

Quote by WannabeWordsmith

This poll might provide some context from a reader perspective.

I have a feeling that is where I get my sense of what readers want in length (well that and 12+ years on the site). Thanks for bringing it to the discussion.

Quote by WannabeWordsmith

This poll might provide some context from a reader perspective.

Interesting. Thank you for sharing!

I'm in the minority opinion, but LS gives you 10K, so use it. I get annoyed by authors breaking their work into chunks of 2000 or less, when the whole story could easily fit into the word limit of a single submission with room to spare. Stop fucking around and just tell your story. Again, I'm in the minority on this.

Thanks to all. I'm partitioning into a Part 1 and Part 2, which means there will be a time gap between the parts showing up. Lush isn't approving stories again until after January 3 so the moderators will have to work through a backed-up queue before Part 1 shows up and probably still a busy queue before I can submit and they can review Part 2.

Yeah, if I was a mod, I'd be dreading January. There'll probably be a rush to submit as soon as they reopen the queue. Probably a world record queue. We should have a pool on how many stories there'll be after the first 24 hours or something.😀

Quote by rdodger
Lush isn't approving stories again until after January 3

That's not strictly true. We're not accepting new submissions until then, but we'll chip away at publishing the current queue with the aim of making it hit near zero by Jan 3rd.

Thank you for the clarification - and Happy New Year!