chapter lengths : why such variation?

While most novels translated have about the same length, some have much longer length while some much shorter. As someone who is wary of starting any story without at least a standard 20 chapters, the short ones make me feel like if I was hungry, ate something, and only felt hungrier. I noticed the specific genre of transported into another world + body + badass female MC often fall in this category, such as poison genius consort, which I just read. Is there an explanation as to why this happens to be? I'd quite curious

 

It's entirely up to the author how many words they write per chapter. There is no specificity or reasoning to it besides that and the marketing scheme the author has in mind

 

because authors can choose to write however much they want. is it really necessary to ask?
why does a novel want to make you read more? because it has a good story and you want to know what happens next or the author is very good at suspense and thus you want to know what happens next.

 

Yeah. i hate series where 1 paragraph= 1 chapter or thereabouts.

 

Makes sense I guess, the same genre having the same target audience. now curious why this specific genre, target audience likes short chapters

 

I believe the novels with very short chapters are targeted towards mobile (often female) readers who just read a little here and there. Like on public transport or during their work breaks.

 

It's not like I am attacking them for formatting their story so that the chapters are short. oftentimes, even their translates are fast on uploads bcu of the length. It just takes a certain length of narrative for me to feel like it is worth the effort reading and remembering since there are so many stories, it is easy to forget essential plot points.

Makes sense now that I think about it. Even with games girls often like the casual easy to pick up and put down stuff as opposed to most non mobile games

 

This is something for the release sites to improve. In Qidian they have word count after finishing each volume and at the beginning of each chapter if you open it.

 

I'm guessing it's partly because of when the author is writing, sometimes they might get particularly hooked on one event and want to write more on it, whereas, at other times, they need to write something to move the plot forward/for character development/for world building but it doesn't interest them as much and they can't think of as much to write about it.

Oh and for differences between different authors, rather than different chapter lengths within one person's story, i'd have to say because of author preference and intended reader base. Some people just like writing/reading in bitesize chunks.

 

Something I believe from royal road said this and it's one of my favorites

A chapter is as long as it takes to get your point across.

For example the author writes about the side characters pov on something the main character did. Depending on how many characters this could be a really short chapter, and it wouldn't make sense to keep on going in the story when the whole chapter was about there reactions.
For a long chapter it could be what that main character was doing let's say a extremely long and complicated plan going in to action, this could take 5 times the length compared to the reactions.

Hope I helped

 

Its done for a few reasons. The biggest is usually time. Most web authors try to release several times a week, some daily. Even for a skilled writer though 2-4K words a day is a a lot of work. Most people can't keep that pace, either from RL issues or just running out of steam, so some just save up for larger chapters.

The longer a chapter, the slower the release. Vice versa as well.

 

Keep in mind that 2k words in English equal about 3k words in Chinese, too! What you see isn't necessarily what you get in the original language.
There's also the fact that it might be easier to lengthen the story/plot with shorter chapters, especially if the website has requirements for posting schedules to keep a certain status on the site. (Better status = better views = more revenue from readers!) Many of these writers are writing to get paid, so it's in their best interest to keep a series going. Add that to the requirement for updates, and it makes more sense/takes less work to publish short and often, rather than long and seldom.

 

i think it is to make a daily released become more easy,..
when there are a daily release,.. the novel of that author will be visited by many visitor everyday,..
well.. there are many type of author and different rule from different site,.