For Readers - Length of story

[AlexUSA3]

I posted this in the wrong forum.

Simple question, really. What do you prefer? Short? Long? One chapter? Few chapters? Many chapters? A novel?

I personally published a one shot, got tons of feedback, and published the next one shot based on that feedback and got absolutely no acknowledgment whatsoever. "Give the people what they want, and they will come" need not apply here.

I see the same happen to others... they write a story to some lofty standard and get tons of feedback, but the next story gets nothing. It kills an author to get such spotty responses because then they don't know where to improve or what things made the story interesting and/or engaging.

I'm making this the first of what will likely be a series of polls that I hope will help not only me but also other authors to figure out what keeps the readers reading.

[Xtc]

Almost unanswerable. The absence of feedback is always demoralising but I can't figure out what encourages feedback. Some surprising tales get plenty of feedback but similar ones get hardly any. People are odd! I appreciate any chapters being under 3000 words but I also understand the problems of "chopping" stories up at inappropriate moments.

[BlissfulMisery]

I have always found it a curious subject as to which stories get a lot of views and comments. There often seems to be little rhyme or reason to it, as Xtc mentioned. I have seen extremely well written (on a technical level) stories that fit the subject matter of this board extremely well receive few or zero comments, which is honestly a little depressing to see, as I feel bad for the people putting in the effort.

Honestly it seems like a bit of an ongoing problem with no clear solution. I would not be surprised if there are plenty of people being discouraged from writing here due to getting little to no feedback either way.

And that is not even getting into the issues with critical feedback (which go both ways to be fair)...

To be honest, when clicking on this thread I had initially assumed it was about chapter length - certainly I have seen comments either way on this matter, but generally anything longer then a few thousand words seems to be a bit too long for most people's taste.

But to answer the original question instead of rambling on about vaguely related things...

Again, as was said above, I think it is impossible to answer. I certainly have never chosen to read, or not chosen to read something, based on the number of chapters, but I suppose I am probably not the best benchmark for other reasons...