I am just asking how many words a story can have when posting it on this site?
Is there a word limit?
I am just asking how many words a story can have when posting it on this site?
Is there a word limit?
A story, per SOL's system, is practically unlimited in size.
Chapters/Story parts have a limit of 16 MB per chapter/part.
However, due to various browser considerations and other management considerations, it's best to keep each part under 200 KB or 40,000 words.
I shoot for between 40,000 and 50,000 characters in a chapter. Occasionally I went over 50,000 characters. This works out to between 10 and 15 8 1/2" by 11" pages. The page variation is due to text density. Hope this helps.
I shoot for between 40,000 and 50,000 characters in a chapter. Occasionally I went over 50,000 characters.
For me, it's around 6000 words, which, in my writing style and with my vocabulary, works out to 35,000 to 38,000 characters. I have had as many as 10,000 words in a chapter, but that's exceedingly rare, and as few as 4500, which is also exceedingly rare.
I have similar goals. When I first started on SOL, I'd often write 15K word chapters, yet none of us are that young and spry anymore, so 3K to 7K is a more reasonable average in the modern day and age.
Yet as always, each chapter needs to be as long as it needs to be, not a word more and not a word less, thus simultaneiously as detailed and as concise as possible. But that mostly arises from subsequent revisions, not my first pass purging or words onto the page. ;)
As far as total physical size, that's more of a concern with visual images, depending on how detailed and how the images are rendered (ex: full color, B&W, grayscale or crosshatched, often the most effective for online stories, though much harder to render).
But 16Mbyte of text or 50,000 word chapters can take a bit to process, so few try for those extremes. As in the end, it's how strong your concentration is while reading. Some prefer detail-oriented stories, yet most prefer comfortable reads, even when the subject matter isn't.
Sort of tangentially interesting, I was curious what zbookstore was using to define the lengths of Novels, Novellas and Short Stories and by listing the books in ascending size (it seems to sort them by word count), I discovered
Novels - 40k words or more
Novellas - 10k to just under 40k words
Short Stories - any length under 10k words
What's interesting is that there a couple of stories that... are listed as having, like EXACTLY 40k or 10k words at the beginning of those listings. Wonder what's going on there? Some sort of rounding hiccup? Wordslop cutoff to meet the exact requirement? Who knows! I wasn't willing to purchase one of them to check, haha
Word count is the international publishing standard, as whatever the 'size' of a book is, counting anything else ends up being misleading. Stories are told in words, while images, fonts and font sizes can chew up all sorts of space completely irrelevant to the underlying story.
In fact, many complain that they never glance at included images, preferring to imagine the characters their own way. While I've used a lot of images over the years, I prefer illustrating the content rather than the characters themselves, so my images are more often suggestive or representational. But then, I do have the requisite graphic arts training to know how to render such details (mostly for covers, not per chapter).
Luckily, as SOL has grown over the years, so has its overall capabilities.