Question No of Chapters In A LN Volume?

How many chapters are usually in a light novel volume?

 

seems to run between 4 to 6 depending on novel type, page count per chapter and break points. while full novels can run in to the hundreds. honestly I've never been to sure where a web novel falls as each "chapter" can fall as a single web page unlike a printed book.

 

It really depends. That's like asking "how many chapters are there in a young adult novel?" Different genres can give rise to different numbers of chapters.
As for web novels that get republished as light novels, I've seen that they mostly follow the same chapters. There may be differences like combining the different parts into a single chapter or adding in the additional one chapter for backstory.

 

yeah, book's have a standard 4-6 chapters for jp side, but they are far bigger than web novel standard.
take this word count that i took for grimgar vol1 : 70.000 words
for Jp novels : is a little more complex cn when taking a webnovel to book novel : where i do agree that most webnovelist in JP uses short chapters as well the same as cn that results in 2-3k english word per chapter, sometimes slightly higher word count , there is no rule like it exist on cn where is pretty much standard because of the big guy's like qidian etc, so every now and then you will find some JP authors who uses huge amount of characters in their chapter, that sometimes looks exactly like a standard book chapter, going up to 10k words easily but most of them always uses a slightly higher word count than a standard cn side, so i would put between 30 webnovel chapters for a book, i believe this a good middle ground.

cn novels:
as we know a standard web novel chapter for cn have more or less 1.5k 2k Chinese characters that translated in more or less 2-3k english words, of course this is not for every novel nor for every chapter but goes more or less in that numbers because the standard created by the big guy's and the daily updates.
Plus a standard cn book on the other hand have far more pages than LN one, sometimes even double, in reality pretty much double or more , but since we don't have too big data to look in it since only recently we went legal , it became really hard to pinpoint the amount of chapters per book but earlier books of coiling dragons that i brought on amazon had double the page count of a standard jp novel, so double the amount of total words more or less, if we don't consider spacing etc.
and if we remove some redundancy that cn authors like to use to build up that world count in their daily updates , that i do believe must be removed from physical book, i would put cn novels between 60 to 100 standard webnovel chapter per book.

of course all of this is talking about word count alone, there is a lot more factors to take in consideration when creating a book from a web novel series like pacing of the story, length of the arc's-fights-plots and secondary plots that affects the overall book in the end when creating a physical book that must be sold for since sometimes the "content" of the history itself is not enough. the industry itself needs to make up with some trick's with the book because different from a fan that knows where that history is coming from and where to find them, first time readers mostly of the time have one and only chance to be hooked in it like a fish, only that one and single book and sometimes it is not even vol 1 book, there is cases in the industry where people start reading from vol2 vol3 , the vol they found at the point in time.
so they need to make it be more appealing as whole and this is where some tropes and cliches are introduced somehow when making it from web novel to a book, one of the biggest and most cliche ones one that i believe most people is aware for example is on overlord novel's with Albedo that it did not exist on the web novel, only in the book and all of this affects the book as whole making it bigger sometimes or smaller in other cases.

 

That depends on what the chapters are ment to do in the story, and what type story it is.

Well in japan there is usualy not more than 6 chapters (prologue and epilouge included) + Afterword. for published light novels.

If it's a stroy like game of thrones, where the author regularly chage perspective from one character to another. they might use the chapters to make it easier for the reader to know who they are following. Don't be suprised if there are even more here.
Some use chapters so they include one/two key moments. Basicly saying now we are done with this part of the story, and can deal with the aftermath later, or while going through the next part of the story. this can result in either a lot of chapters or just a few of them.
An example on this could be a story about a prisoner:
- Prolouge is how he was chought.
- Chapter 1 is the time in the prison and the escape from it.
- Chapter 2 is fleeing from his/her persuers.
- Chapter 3 is training and geting to know the rebels.
- Chapter 4 is attacking the city where he/she was a prisoner.
- Epilouge is the Aftermath.
That is basicly the JP LN format. There are also authors that pick out a few events in each of the layed out chapters and make them into everything from 2-3 to +50 chapters.

Spoiler: EDIT: Regarding chinese web novels

I can't say that it's for every WN but they usualy follow something like mentioned above by placing a word limit on the chapters. Thry also usualy add some clues hinting towards more happening behind the scenes, or towards a larger world out there in after a certian point in the story. So if the novel is popular or profitable for them, they can make the epilouge into the prolouge of the continuation of the story.

Others, decide chapters based on word count. basicly just write until you have about 2k words then find a suitable place to end it around that mark.


I know it's not exactly the answer you where looking for, but hoped it helped, even if just a little.
Tho this is just my own thought, I have no real knowledge except conjectures from my experience.

EDIT: There are multiple other ways to also write chapters that I dd not bother with writing. just had to do something while origianaly writing, so I forgot to add that. this was mainly to show that not every chapter is the same in how they are decided.

 

Can't be told for sure, because it depends on how author write the chapters, the length, how many parts are discarded, or added, the side stories they add.

Normally you will see that each volume has between 200 and 300 pages, including drawings, toc, side stories afterwords.

 

Thank you all for the responses.
Cheers!

 

ew, European