I hadn’t planned on publicizing this post so early (not until my new story’s out), but due to my blog post about my crowdfunding page, which can be viewed here, I decided to publish this blog post. This was written and put on hold since Feb. 22, 2018...

Hi, Typies!

Yes, today’s blog post will be about word-count. You might wonder why I’m having a long—and possibly unnecessary—blog post about the trivial matter, word-count, but it’s important. Very important. So, I hope that you will have the patience and an open mind to read everything. It’s not often that I have blogs, and when I do, it really is something “major” that affects my stories, and it could affect yours after reading this post.

So…word-count, huh…?

What about it?

Well, toward the end of 2017, I noticed that there had been a few authors who started questioning and making polls on AFF regarding word-count to know what a reader’s favored average for a chapter was. At first, it didn’t perk my interest because I didn’t think much or care about word-count. It did get my attention when I started seeing polls after polls (even discussions were made) with similar questions, so I did a bit of research on the site. Turned out that many readers liked chapters with an average of 3k to 5k.

I was quite surprised because I was the minority. I prefer and love lengthy and bulky chapters, especially ones that ranged over 5k and neared 8k. It got me worried that my chapters were against the statistic. Prior to knowing this, I had already made edits to my stories’ word-count to fit my 8k preference (before this though, my chapters were in the 3k-5k (in other words, my chapters were in the favored average range, but I did changes to it)).

I was worried because it made me realize that my personal preference could overwhelm my readers or could even ward off potential new readers due to the long read (AFF shows the word-count for each chapter), so I re-shortened my chapters. It “worked well” for two of my published stories, but it didn’t “work well” for the other published story and for the upcoming stories I have in draft status.

I was in a rut again.

More importantly, I didn’t feel satisfied as an author. I gave my written stories a long look (because they were the ones I made changes to) and noticed that the reason why I wasn’t feeling satisfied with them was because the shortening of my chapters made me “cut off” or end the chapter at parts that weren’t a good cliff-hanger to leave the readers with an emotional response (confusion, curiosity, shock, suspicion, etc.). That was the only reason why my stories didn’t “work well” with the 3k-5k length (and it’s important to me, something that will be further explained below).

But…the preferred average word-count reminded me that I shouldn’t exceed it.

So…I was stuck between choosing a personal favorite or choosing an audience preference.

After a long thought, I decided to go with my instinct, meaning my chapters will average between 5k-7k with an occasional 8k, if the chapter must exceed the range.

Before anyone facepalms my unwise decision, may I defend myself? Reasons and their explanations are below:

Putting my personal preference aside, this choice was firmly based on integrity from me to you, and integrity from me to myself. First and foremost, as I have emphasized countless times before, I write because I love writing and it’s a huge part of my existence. Dramatic, yes, but it’s the truth. Therefore, I shouldn’t be too focused on what “research” says. I shouldn’t let it dictate my way of writing because if I did, I’d have to tweak my writing, and I want to stay true to myself in some way. That’s my integrity to myself (well, more to my writing, actually). Now, I’m not saying that writers who don’t write over 5k aren’t being true to themselves. No, writing over 5k is my personal preference and has always been a personal preference. If writing between 3k-5k chapters is your best, please, continue.

As for my integrity to you (the reader), it’s a bit more complex. The above integrity is based on an author’s point of view. This integrity (from me to you) is based on a reader’s point of view. I too am a reader, but when it comes to reading creative works online like this, I am a binge-reader. So, I only read stories that are close to finishing or are finished. The reason for that is because I have read great stories that were never completed because the author was discouraged to continue for whatever reason, the author deactivated the account, or the author was taking an awfully long time to write a new chapter and I have lost interest in it (the worse one that I had come across was an author not knowing how else to continue, so they rather drop the work than take time to complete it).

I completely understand that everyone has a personal life, and writing creative stories online might a passing hobby, therefore, they can’t update regularly or don’t have the time to write more than 5k in one sitting, so I’m not badmouthing anyone for that. I want to make that clear.

Also, my integrity to you (the readers) is a guarantee of what I, the author, will do for you in terms of publishing and content. Regarding publishing, I know that as a reader, it could be a bit frustrating to not know when the next chapter will be published, especially if the author doesn’t set a schedule. Or worse, the waiting period between chapters is inconsistent or is very long. It’s why my integrity, or my guarantee, to you is having a publishing schedule—usually, one chapter is published on one of the first Friday to Sunday of the month).

The second part of my integrity to you relates to content this time, and that is that my 5k-7k word-count assures you that I am not updating the story or publishing the chapter for the sake of updating or publishing. In other words, the chapter has content that moves the plot along. I’m sure we have been disappointed because a new chapter for a story is extremely short (camouflaged by a large font or an informative author’s note at the bottom)—or the chapter could be fairly long with little to no pushing-forward content that is minutely related to the story’s premise at all.

Substance, if I may say, is the major factor I need to be satisfied with for both you, the reader, and for me, the author. If I feel satisfied with what I’ve written (and it’s usually over 5k), then I consider it valid enough to publish the chapter. This substance relates to why I didn’t feel satisfied with the shortening of my chapters, and it also relates to the integrity of myself. In other words, substantial content is the overall importance I must feel satisfied with before I release a chapter.

Of course, as like beauty, whatever is considered “substance” is different from person to person, and I “achieve” it if I have a chapter with 5k-7k words. Why? Because it’s a physical assurance to you that the new chapter I released was not written in a five-minute sitting, but in a two-hour sitting that included detailed processing, multiple revisions, precise planning, and dutiful research.

Once again, I am not implying or saying that anyone who writes less than 5k or who could write in under 5 minutes don’t have “substance” in their story or chapters. The above paragraph is solely a pledge I’m proving to my readers, not a generalization about everyone else and their writing.

Objectively speaking, if I had kept my stories in their 3k-5k word-count format, most of my stories would reach 100 chapters. To some authors (I’m a victim too), reaching 100 chapters could be a goal because it kind of shows us that we wrote a lot or that the story was doing well, or whatever other reasons we believe. But when I have extended the word-count per chapter by combining the chapters, it made me see the reality that the chapter count was way below 100!

When I saw this, I felt like I had cheated my readers and had made them (you) believe that I have a lot of chapters. Some readers, if they don’t judge the cover of the story, judge the number of chapters in a story. If it’s too few, they might believe it’s not worth a read. If it’s too many, they might think there are plenty of superficial writing. To avoid having a reader judge my work based on the number of chapters (if I actually could), the 5k-8k word-count helps me by giving the readers the impression that my chapters have content and substance, thus, it explains the few number of chapters the story has.

I know there are only two reasons for my risky and foolish choice to have my stories formatted in 5k-8k word-count, but I wanted to let you know of my (long-term or short-term) decision. Of course, it may be subjected to change in the future, depending on personal taste and on the “theme” of the current story.

Anyway, the main points of this lengthy blog post are:

1) to tell you my word-count preference

2) to give you a heads-up about them, especially if word-count matters to you or plays a role in your choice to continue reading or skipping the story

3) to explain my decision

I am sorry if you believed this is of little importance and had wasted your time, but I do want to thank you for bearing with me.

Thank you,

Mstyper.