As I upload over a decade of fic...

[thefannishwaldo]

... to AO3, the age old question rears it's ugly head.  To chapter, or not to chapter?  The vast majority of my fics are less than 8,000 words, which I'm pretty okay with leaving as one big post.

But when I get into things that are 10K or 20K, or the West Wing monster from hell thats 30K plus... I wonder what people prefer.

Poll long fics

Comments

[tejas]

As a reader, I prefer to see a story in one piece, when possible, no matter the length. That said, I know I'm probably in the minority. On the other hand, I find multiple chapters of less than about 5k to be incredibly irritating, to the point where I will skip a long fic I might otherwise have enjoyed because it's broken up into teeny-tiny chapters and don't want to spend half my life clicking to the next one. I've read stories where it took me longer to load the new page than it did to read the chapter.

When I get around to loading my SG1 fic over there (I loaded my NCIS fic the other day), I'll probably put In the Company of Men out there in as few pieces as possible. It's in 3 pieces on Area52, 18, I think, on Alpha Gate and the original 32 on The Cartouche (those are 5k to 8k chapters, btw ;-).

[anjak_j]

I'm not a big fan of separate posts for chapters and prefer a story to be presented on one page where possible, with the chapters indicated as per the author's preference - dashed lines, subheadings, use of anchor links, etc.

[scifinut]

My preference is that if there are chapters they are sufficiently long. Something that has 13 chapters under 1000 words each is MUCH more annoying than 40,000 words in one chapter to me.

That said, if you do decide to chapter, make the jumps manageable. When I'm breaking things into chapters I tend to think of it as either an episode of TV or a made for TV movie, where would the commercials fit in? The chapters may not all be the same size, but as long as they flow and make sense, you're not disrupting a scene then it makes me happy.