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What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

penguin.co.uk

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Re: What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

#31

Post by passion__desire »

keiferski wrote: post #19
passion__desire wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humanities department generally / traditionally haven't believed in insights that come from mathematics.

Depends on what you mean by traditionally. This division is largely a consequence of the battle between scientific-technical education and classics/Latin-Greek education in the 19th century. Prior to that, there was definitely a ton of overlap between humanities and mathematics - consider Leibniz as a prime example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures

Conside the "Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis" theory. It is nothing but Synthesis = λ × Antithesis + (1 - λ) × Thesis

Re: What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

#32

Post by adonovan »

iambateman wrote: post #26
lumb63 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worry about the same thing. I will say, however, that I worry more about this in the context of news articles, conversation, and other shorter-duration activities. Books are a big commitment, and it is highly disappointing to find out someone stretched a 50 page book into 250 pages to get it published. Sometimes it helps to instill the idea, or provides useful elaboration, but sometimes it is filler with no discern…

This is largely an issue of trust and priority, not attention span, right? The same people who fly through TikTok videos also regularly sit through a two hour movie or read the entire Harry Potter series. I think that people can pay attention if they want to, and the cultural shift is _what_ we expect to give attention to.

I too used to believe that, but I've since met too many children who have told me they don't like going to the movies because you have to pay attention for two continuous hours during which you aren't allowed to use your phone.

Re: What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

#33

Post by qingcharles »

sebastiennight wrote: post #27

When I was re-writing one of my books in 2016, I spent the whole summer asking successful entrepreneurs (my reader audience) what was their favorite business book, and why. It turned out that the "favorite book" answer was fairly varied (aside from a couple of big-name bestsellers), but the "why" answer almost always revolved around: - "bite-size chapters" - "really quick read" - "short and to the point" - "one idea,…

James Patterson's books are generally the worst I've ever read, but his short 2-3 page chapters are surely one of the reasons for his success. They're like popping M&M's -- you're thinking, "I can just do one more."

Re: What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

#34

Post by ComputerGuru »

sambeau wrote: post #22

I am writing children's books. One mantra I try to keep to is to make my chapters ~15 minutes long when read aloud by a parent at bed time. This gives them the ability to be consistent in their bedtime routine. This way children don't get short-changed and adults don't find they have committed to something they can't get out of. It also allows them to easily give in and do another chapter — after all, it's only 15 mi…

As a parent that’s grappled with this: thank you!

Re: What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

#35

Post by reidjs »

adonovan wrote: post #32
iambateman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is largely an issue of trust and priority, not attention span, right? The same people who fly through TikTok videos also regularly sit through a two hour movie or read the entire Harry Potter series. I think that people can pay attention if they want to, and the cultural shift is _what_ we expect to give attention to.

I too used to believe that, but I've since met too many children who have told me they don't like going to the movies because you have to pay attention for two continuous hours during which you aren't allowed to use your phone.

Perhaps it’s the movies fault for not being interactive or engaging enough

Re: What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

#36

Post by forgotacc240419 »

reidjs wrote: post #35
adonovan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too used to believe that, but I've since met too many children who have told me they don't like going to the movies because you have to pay attention for two continuous hours during which you aren't allowed to use your phone.

Perhaps it’s the movies fault for not being interactive or engaging enough

Or for being unnecessarily long; 90 minute films seem scarce nowadays even for kids

Re: What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

#37

Post by camel-cdr »

wongarsu wrote: post #23
jb1991 wrote: post #9

The larger question for me is the long-term effect of rapidly vanishing attention spans in our population. The short-form format across tweets, tiktok, much on youtube, instagram, SMS vs. voicemail -- even email is often considered "too long" for newer generations -- what is the likely consequence of this? It seems dangerous in the long-term, but maybe not. Is it just a temporary cultural shift, or is it resulting in…

If we take fanfiction as indication of how younger people produce and consume content then the effect is that chapters get shorter while books get longer. Of course take that with a grain of salt because *waves wagely at the statement full of issues*. But it tracks with other trends in social media. Many people will be able to tell you more about their favorite tik-toker than their favorite long-form-content producer…

> If we take fanfiction as indication of how younger people produce and consume content then the effect is that chapters get shorter while books get longer.

Except, that assumption might not be true.

To set a baseline I looked at LOR statistics:

    62 chapters
    1255 pages
    381103 words
    7759 words/chapter
    20 page/chapter
Then I looked at the 100 most bookmarked fanfics on AO3 in one of the most popular fandoms (Harry Potter):

    218401 average word count
    33 average chapters
    9435 average words/chapter
Now 15 of the 100 fanfics are one-shots with only one chapter, if we exclude those we get the following numbers:

    253386 average word count excluding one-shots
    39 average chapters excluding one-shots
    7544 average words/chapter excluding one-shots
For reproduction, I used the following for scraping and processed the data further in vim:

    lynx -dump 'link to ao3 filter page' | grep -A2 'Words\|Chapters' | tr -d '\n,-' | sed 's/\[[0-9]*\]//g;s/  */ /g;s/Words/\nWords/g'

Re: What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

#38

Post by ProllyInfamous »

dark__paladin wrote: post #28

For me personally 5k-10k / chapter and 20-30 chapters per book is optimal.

I'm 2/3rd of the way through Love in Time of Cholera and it's only chapter four (@200+pages, so far)... otherwise, an absolutely beautiful story of unrequited/parasocial love.

By far the worst chapter structure (and "book") is The Sound and The Fury. It seems like an exercise in-the-second-person, gone wrong. Sensorial overload... and isn't the point of a good story ?

Re: What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

#39

Post by Yawrehto »

1. I wonder how much of the reason people seem to like shorter chapters is because shorter-chapter books tend to have quicker pacing. Would there be some way of controlling for pacing? 2. The title is a bit misleading. I went in assuming it would be some sort of analysis - average chapter length vs number of copies sold, for instance. It's certainly a lovely read and decent history, but it doesn't answer the central question. 3. The username of the poster (samclemens) is a fitting username for a post about books with a particular focus on older 'classics'.

Re: What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

#40

Post by bccdee »

passion__desire wrote: post #12
jll29 wrote: post #10

I was hoping for some statistics about avg. (mean, mode) chapter length, and changes over time, given that this post comes from Penguin, who have plenty of data at their fingertips. Still, an interesting blog post.

Humanities department generally / traditionally haven't believed in insights that come from mathematics.

Mathematics can only give you insight into things that can be quantified. When people try do things like (say) perform a statistical analysis of the tone of a narrative, they have to either go through and numerically quantify the tone of each passage (time-consuming & of dubious value) or feed the whole thing through sentiment analysis software (practically useless). You'll learn much more from a close subjective reading of a few interesting passages.
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