Chapter Length! (Beta Bully VS HOGBOS) (Patreon)

How do I decide how long a chapter should be? This sounds like a question for a behind-the scenes post! 🤗

Well, I usually have my outline for what I want to happen in the story. But if the chapter just keeps getting longer and longer to the point where it doesn’t match what is normal for that series, I will usually try to chop it in half or work out whether I am squeezing too many scenes into one place.

For example, Beta Bully chapters are usually around 1K words, but the longest I’ve posted publicly was around 1.8K, and the shortest was 700. The longest Beta Bully chapter overall was actually the winter exclusive which clocked in at 2.3K! Whereas for Hearts of Gold and Blades of Steel, the average is 2.5K and I believe the shortest is about 1.2K. Alliance chapters fall somewhere between the two 😅

With Hearts of Gold and Blades of Steel, the writing style is much more flowery and detailed than Beta Bully, so less action takes place even though there are more words. In the example images, you can see that those sections are similar length (~250 words), but a lot less plot progression takes place in Hearts of Gold and Blades of Steel as the style is meant to be more immersive and heavy, whereas Beta Bully is intended to be a faster and easier read. HOGBOS also has multiple plotlines/arcs taking place at the same time, which makes it seem like the plot is moving slower because multiple plots are progressing in small increments at the same time. 

I enjoy writing both, but I do definitely fall in and out of the mood to write each style - there will be a BTS post about writing style at some point! 👩🏻‍💻

Word count isn’t everything, and the story matters most, but some online sites will force you to cut down chapters if they are too long. This has happened to me a lot with both Mates & Marks and Hearts of Gold and Blades of Steel. Both those stories have double the amount of chapters on Tapas & Neovel than they do on AO3 because of their character limit. Also, on sites like Tapas, Wattpad & Neovel, they favour very frequent updates of shorter chapters in order to get you noticed. On AO3, if you tag your story well, people can still find it even if you’re not uploading multiple times a week. But on other sites that don’t have such a clear tagging or ranking system, it’s all about popping up in the ‘new’ section as much as possible. On Tapas, even in the ‘popular’ listing, my stories will be well below those that have a quarter of the likes, reads and subscribers that mine do, so those are no help either. The only listing I can count on to be accurate is ‘new’ or ‘latest’.

Chapter length was something I struggled with a lot with Mates & Marks, and I think is why I always felt that the pacing was slightly off, because instead of worrying about how much action was in a chapter, I was focused on the word count. I felt that if a chapter wasn’t 2K words at least, it wasn’t enough. Which meant that I ended up squeezing together different scenes and POVs into the same chapters with just a little marker/symbol to show the perspective/setting/time was shifting. Looking back, the average chapter length of that series should have been much more varied. I squeezed 91K words into 24 chapters for Make Me Beg 🤯 That’s an average of 3.7K per chapter!

These days, I make my cut-off point decisions based on scene/perspective changes and how much action has occurred in the chapter. I think it works better, even if it means there has to be the occasional shorter chapter 😊