Forum: Story Discussion and Feedback

Hi Everyone!
I know there will be no RIGHT answer for this, but looking for feedback from both reader and writer's perspectives.

For the record, I use Brave browser, and have virtually no crashing issues, so I want to make sure that people understand this question has nothing to do with losing my place due to browser issues. Also, I am reading exclusively on a Samsung z fold phone. Its smaller than a tablet, but basically double the size of a traditional phone.

I just finished the final book of a 3 book series. In the third book, the chapters averaged 21,000 words.
To me, they felt excessively long. The content wasnt the issue, it was the pacing and choosing to not break it up into a larger amount of smaller chunks.

Another series I enjoyed immensely had chapters averaging 4,200 words. They never felt excessively short, and it seemed to make the pacing flow more evenly.

I think perhaps 10,000 max word chapters would be a sweet spot for me.

The story with 21,000 word chapters for me, felt like a bit of a slog to get through at times.

Just curious if anyone else has strong opinions about chapter lengths. This is completely subjective of course.

It depends on how often a chapter is posted. If posting every day, then a short chapter would be ok as you can skip a few days. If it is a week or more then not so good.

I don't know about word count, I am mostly concerned with reading time. At most I spend an hour at a time, and if it is a long chapter, I don't know where I was if I pick up on a different device. I read on a Desk top, Lap top, and Tablet, depending on where I am.

Im going to use a couple specific examples from two stories that people are likely very familiar with.

Al Steiner's Intemperance X (the finale). Has an amazing review score of 9.62 and averages 11,500 words per chapter. It is one of the best stories on this site. The cast and years of plotting are among the best we've seen. I consider his chapters long, but not too long to make the reading experience less enjoyable. In this case, I feel like the choice of the author in chapter length was perfect.

In another example, again, a very successful and beloved story. Runaway Train by Jay Cantrell. It has a user review score of 9.02 and has an average chapter length of 4,650. The book has roughly 200k more words than intemperance, and almost 5x the amount of chapters. The book read incredibly quickly and flowed very well.

In my personal opinion, intemperance is the far better book. We as readers have a decade(?) of loving those characters and interconnected plot lines. BUT, Runaway Train was a more pleasant reading experience.

Just thought id give a couple specific examples to give more context.

I find a chapter length of 39,000 to 45,000 characters a comfortable length. In terms of words 7,600 is approximately 41,700 characters. Obviously I think in characters as that is what my writing ap shows