Ask HN: How would you write novels for people who rarely read entire books?

People do read a lot nowadays, but generally this consists of reading short articles and snippets of text.

The internet has made people very impatient when it comes to reading long articles/books.

How would you write a novel for people who rarely read books cover to cover?

Tim OReilly's twitter book is like a slide deck. It's also not really writing.

Use very short chapters. If a person only needs to spend 10 mins to advance to the next chapter, they are more likely to complete the book.

This is a weird goal. I would guess your best shot would be making each chapter of the book short enough to be read in a short period of time and (more importantly) an independent story capable of standing on its own. How you balance that independence with a flowing story in a novel is a hard question.

This is an interesting question, but I am not sure about some of the assumptions behind it.

Consider how I do things: the net has indeed made me impatient, in many contexts. When I read an HN post, I usually give it at most a paragraph or so to convince me it's worth finishing. If I'm not convinced by then, I usually skip the rest. If I am convinced, I still often just skim the rest.

However, I still read novels. I read them the old-fashioned way, cover-to-cover, in order. But I do so in a very different context from my web browsing. So, the way to write a novel for me is much the same way that a novel was written 50 or 100 years ago.

But that's just me. Other people might be different; I wouldn't know. However, in that case, I must ask another question: if someone isn't going to read a novel, then why would you want to write one for them?