Does anyone have any data, hunches, or strong opinions on how long a Ream chapter should be?
I have been serializing my first drafts on Wattpad since 2017, where the official advice was to keep “story parts” to about 1500-2500 words (I think it’s gotten shorter since). As my chapters tend to be pretty long, usually 2 or 3 sections at about 2500 words each, I have been breaking them up and posting the individual sections as story parts/chapters.
I would love to post the full chapters, the way they are meant to be read, but I do understand scroll fatigue is definitely a thing. I have experienced it.
I try to keep my chapters between 1000 and 2000 words, because short chapters are more likely to keep readers engaged. But I’m also a firm believer in chapter being as long as they need to be to tell what you want to tell.
For me, it varies. My chapters for books are generally 1500-2500, whereas my series come in just under that, at 800-1500 words. I plan on upping that to at least 1200 words, for the sake of consistency.
My chapters are usually 1.3k to 1.8k words long (sometimes a chapter will go over 2k words but that’s rare) so that’s how long my chapters are on Ream as that’s the length my readers expect.
I’d be interested to know if anyone has experienced a good result from making their chapters longer or shorter on Ream, compared to their chapters on other platforms like Wattpad.
To make my life easier, my episodes (chapters) are the same length that they are on other platforms (like Vella). That means I don’t need to edit for different platforms.
Some series sit at 600-900 words per episode, others are more like 1000-1700 words per episode. Just depends on what the story calls for.
This is probably something to ask your fans for preferences or join the Ream of a few people in your genre for a month (or follow them to get longer term info) and check what they’re doing.
I just went with the full chapters. The task of copying four books over was daunting enough without tripling the number of chapters by breaking each one into their component sections.
