Does Length Matter?

Too long can put the online reader off

I am often asked, how long should a short story be? My flippant answer is usually, half as long as your first draft, but so much is dependent on the medium you intend to publish it in.

I’ve been seeing a lot of hundo stories on the online publishing site, Medium. A hundo is a story written in exactly a hundred words. These are great fun for a writer and can be quite lucrative since Medium pays writers for stories that are read for more than thirty seconds, clapped for and commented on (usually by other writers).

A hundo gives a short sharp hit but often seems a bit contrived and leaves the reader thinking, you could have added a few more words and really told me a story. Flash fiction does this, it has no specific word count and can be anything from a few words to several hundred but it does have a plot, a beginning, a middle and an end.

If you want to read a really good piece of flash fiction try Looking Back To the Summer of Ninety-Five by

May More

- it’s only available on Medium and you will need to be a subscriber to read it.

As a reader, I will often pick up a book that is a couple of inches thick and start reading but baulk at an online story that is more than 4000 words long (a twelve-minute read).

Why?

A book is a book, it does not do much else, apart from maybe swat the occasional fly or prop up a table leg. When I put down a book because the postman calls or it’s time for tea I am fairly sure I can pick it up in a few minutes, in an hour’s or even a day’s time and start reading it again in the same place. Even without a bookmark, it is quite easy to flick through the pages and find where I had got to.

Reading online is different. Phones, tablets and laptops ring, ping and generally distract us. If I lose my place in a long online story it can take a lot of scrolling with words whizzing past unreadably fast to try and find my place (I am using the term online here because e-readers will at least find your last read place for you).

We, your readers, have all been typecast as channel hopping excitement addicts with short attention spans. Yes, there is a lot of competition out there so you will need to grab me by the imagination (What Do You Want From Erotic Writing?). Once you have got me, make it easy for me to keep reading. If your short story is not that short, break it up into instalments. Make sure there is a link to the next section at the end of each instalment so, with one click, I can carry on.

Length does matter.

Even as a book reader, I have a preference for shorter chapters. The sort of length I can read in ten to fifteen minutes before going to sleep.

I am releasing one of my books, The Donnington Chronicles as a serialized story to paid subscribers. The Donnington Chronicles was originally written for a paperback publisher. In book form, the chapters were about 3000 - 6000 words long. I have edited the chapters for the serialized version down to around 1500 words. For the average reader that is about a six to eight-minute read.

A read time of under ten minutes means a reader can dip in and if they have more time, follow the link at the bottom of the page to the next chapter. I have also added a contents page to my website.

Making Movies, a naughty tale about two mature ladies who decide to make a porno movie was originally published as a 4000+ word short story. It was popular as a subscribers story on Medium and as a freebie on my website but is getting more reads as a four-part serial on Substack.

Having spent time creating, writing, editing and polishing your story it is worth thinking about how you can deliver it to your readers in the most palatable style.