Question how long is a ideal novel should be?

As long as it keeps its readers entertained it can be as long as it wants to be.

 

Too subjective. As long as it takes. If it can go 3000 chapters with minimal "fluff" chapters that just give +1 chapter count without actually progressing the narrative while still being interesting/engaging then that's great.

It's when authors go for the filler to pad the chapter count that it starts to fall apart.

 

There is no fixed length it could be though there is definitely majority consensus of it about how long it was comfortable for most people.
Note that in making an epic or saga there are in my opinion three major mistake which is 1) losing directions due to world building and character expansion 2) unnecessarily complicated twists making plot holes and loose end of the story 3) repetition of the story development which is as well unfortunately would probably also happened in the author other works.


There's a good new writers assistant tools in the android named Character Planner do try it out. I've been pretty amazed by how useful they are.

 

one word

 

2000 words per chapters...
300 - 500 chapters for a webnovel...

That is the ideal length if you are gunning for 'quality'.

1500 - 3000 words
800 - 1000+ chapters is the average of what chinesse novel do...

 

Depends on the author, but:
Need to tie up all lose ends well
Try to make the story consistent
Depending on the situation, dont create an asspull(search google for examples)
Make a timeline of mixing interesting, normal, dark or something like that, readers get bored of something like OP character acting dumb in the middle of the series
Dont aim for too interesting topic in the beggining, make the novel's world as you write, authors tend to burn out durung the first and middle part of the series because they dont know what to add anymore becoming a streotype fest or a random mishmash
Hope my opinion can help

 

It should be long enough to comfortably tell your story.

Don't worry about the number of chapters or word count. In books from published authors, I've seen chapters as short as a small paragraph to as long as 30ish pages.

 

I'd say you should try to avoid going over 200-300 chapters if you're writing a webnovel (supposing around 2k words per chapter). If you're thinking of a published book, I'd say to avoid going over 1500 pages.

People here in NU are really used to really long and repetitive stories, so keep that in mind when taking their advice into account... Generally speaking, having an excessively long series can make it lose its track, so it's not something I'd recommend.

Try starting small, if possible with a story you can end in 50000 words. It should give you a good starting point.

 

It really depends on how long you need the story to be told. I mean, if there's a lot going on in your novel, there's no reason you should shorten it. If there very few things going on in your novel and you can't increase the content, there's no reason to lengthen it. If you're trying to sell it, shorter novels are more efficient, regarding profit over effort. If your story is too long, you have to sell it at higher price than a novel of its type, but customer may not be willing to pay them.

A good way to have a rough idea of how long your story will be like is to make a basic skeleton of the story. Basically, what happens in Introduction, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action and Conclusion? Once you've written the key points, you can further break it down into scenes. Depending on your writing style, each scene can be its own chapter or two scenes can make one chapter.

You may then realize that a simple basic skeleton end up ballooning into 120 chapters if you make each scene its own chapter. And that is fine. You are not a published author, it's okay to lose focus and wander into scenes unrelated to the story from time to time. Even published authors aren't truly focused. Difference between you and published authors is that they have editors who berate them for going out of focus, thus keeping pages within specific range.

It's fine. Just write what you want to write. You can later come back and remove or add stuff to make it easier to read or to add or remove details. What's important is just to write without thinking too much about how long it's gonna be.

 

As long as it needed to be. I could read 5k chapters if only the plots are interesting enough.

 

From my experience 300-500 chapters 2-3 pages a chapter seem to be more than sufficient. Anything above that get's repetitive, around 350 is where I would want most of the CN novels to end , saddly they go on for thousands of chapters.

Better to write short well written story than long inconsistent mess

 

IMO it would be great to have around 400-600 chapters. Good to binge and neither too long or too short.