Over the three years that I have been writing as an author on CHYOA, I have noticed a gap in the site's rating system. If you specialize (as I do) in longer chapters, more plot, more complex themes, deeper characters, longer chapters... more words, then I find it easy to get lost in the data on the CHYOA homepage. Likes, bookmarks and especially chapter depth encourage a quick, easy posting system of 1000 words (often even less, which I think violates the site's rules) and dilute the readers' search results. That is my personal opinion. Under no circumstances do I want to introduce more rules or controls, in my opinion that leads to nothing, but I also want some kind of note if I put six to eight hours of work into a chapter rather than 20 minutes. I write both kinds of stories (100 Words and 5-8000 Words per chapter) and know from experience that the thought process is completely different when approaching fast paced erotica and long lasting novels. I would therefore like to suggest that CHYOA introduces a separate category for authors that includes a minimum number of words. An obligation to always keep a chapter within the framework of these rules. 2000 to 4000 words or so. Enough space to let your imagination run wild. I think it would help readers if there was a special area for such authors, let's call it comitted authors, established writers or something like that. Everyone should have the right to publish and write on CHYOA within the rules. But with this system, the reader has the advantage of having a system that addresses quality and makes it easier to find, something that is difficult to achieve with likes and chapter depth. The more short chapters, the more likes a story gets in general. The more chapters, even if they are short, the more interest it generates among readers. In addition, a special area on the start page would ensure that a chapter remains visible for longer. I would therefore like to have this extra space on the homepage that allows the reader to search specifically for long-lasting entertainment. A kind of badge in the author's profile could also help, or we could adapt the news feed. You could mark the story specifically so that the reader can find it quickly, or we could provide information that includes the approximate word count of each chapter. And the more often you post, the more attention you get on the page. An extra section for authors who cannot conform to this scheme because of their writing style would provide an additional opportunity to be found and help the reader to decide between quick pleasure and longer entertainment. I am interested in hearing your opinion on this and would like to discuss it to see if my idea finds supporters here.
I wouldn't be absolutely opposed to the idea of a "Longform" section, but I don't know if it would really increase the visibility of your stories. CHYOA has a lot of churn, it's not like Literotica where a story can remain visible in a given category for much longer than a day before sinking out of sight. Stories that gain a lot of likes tend to be those that are added to frequently...but even frequency isn't an absolute guarantee of popularity.
While I do think you could add maybe a tag or searchable term for longer stories, I don’t think it should be seen as separate from the rest. I don’t think “longer” means “better” or “above”; I mean, you could write a long chapter that’s bad, or a short chapter that’s good. Not speaking on the quality of my own work, of course, but as an example I write about 4-5k words a week and chop it up into 4 chapters to be uploaded. I could have put them together if I wanted to aim for a really long chapter, but I think it’s more consumable in that fashion. I personally prefer longer chapters, but sometimes less is more tbh. tldr, I don’t think there’s a right answer due to length not equaling quality.
I'm also against this specific suggestion. The exact same piece of fiction can be split into 10 chapters of 1000 words or 2 chapters of 5000 words. What might work better is some kind of search filter on word count rather than chapter count or maximum depth. Still not perfect, because as MichaelChaseLit says, length is not quality. So what is quality? Well, there's good news and bad news. The good news: the site already has a system to measure it: likes! So why not add a search filter or sorting method based on one or both of those? The bad news: that is a whole-ass other can of worms, because how do you compare a brand new story with 1000 likes and 5000 views to a story that's existed for years with 10000 likes and 1 million views? Is the former better because it has more likes per view? Or is the latter better because it has more likes overall? What about views in and of themselves, does popular = good? Should we take bookmarks into account? Those indicate a user liked a story enough to want to keep reading it next time they visit the site, right? Same for favorites: "I like this story, please tell me if you write more!"
I do agree that the current system heavily favors short chapters. What annoys me in particular is that even "story of the week" is geared towards that. In order to get that spot you need to have a large amount of chapters released in a short amount of time, so naturally spamming a bunch of short chapters is incentivized. That being said, while I take more issue with mini chapters (sub 1000 word count) I don't think extremely long chapters are particularly desirable either. With a Book or even an E-reader you have an easy way to quickly pick off were you stopped reading. You don't really have that advantage on CHYOA were chapters are the only meaningful divider. This is of course a matter of personal preference but my sweet spot is between 1000-2000 words. A decent chunk to read but not so much that finishing a chapter becomes a hassle. So rather then encouraging long format, my preferred action would be to discourage short format.
I always wondered how story of the week was chosen! Hearing that that’s the way is… annoying, imo. I had thought maybe it was just “admin thinks this story is good/ deserves attention!”, so this is an upsetting reality! admittedly, it would be a hassle to cherry-pick a story every week when so much is uploaded, so i *do* get it.
I don't see how shorter chapters would violate the rules. There are recommendations that chapters shouldn't be too short but they can be as short as necessary.
I'm thinking about the case where two stories each have three people liking them. One story has one chapter, another story has ten chapters with a tenth of the words. The story with the long chapters gets three likes, the other 30. That's what I'm concerned about. If you add the length of the chapters to the formula, the likes wouldn't dilute the result so much. In the end, the reader can then decide what he likes to read the most.
Oh no, please don't get me wrong. Longer is not always better. But shorter and more frequent will get more likes in the end, even if the longer story takes up more resources.
This is such a thoughtful suggestion! I totally get the struggle of longer chapters getting buried under quicker, shorter posts. A dedicated section or badge for "committed authors" sounds like a great way to balance the playing field and help readers find the kind of content they’re looking for. Plus, it’d be a nice nod to the effort that goes into crafting those deeper, more complex stories. Hope this gains traction!
I'm definitely an offender of short chapters. I like a quick cadence and it feels more like I'm keeping the reader engaged if they have to click a choice, even with only one option, semi-frequently. That said what search and filtering really do miss and would equalize between long and short chapter preference is to sort by number of favorites as each reader can only award one favorite to a story so it isn't subject to being multiplied by number of chapters.
CHYOA could measure total wordcount. Wouldn't separate the short chapters from the long, but you know what you're getting into when there are 50k words spread out among 500 chapters vs. 50 chapters.
I think the only real solution to a problem as complex as this is to write some super complicated formula to determine what the algorithim pushes and what it doesn't. The problem with having a word count for anything other than a per-chapter basis is that any public story is probably home to more than one author, and most authors have 2, 3, 4, 10, 25, 50 stories, some of which may be written with wildly different average chapter lengths than the others. Hasn't your writing style changed over the years, months, or maybe weeks? Even between braches, the word count can vary a lot, and outliers are always the bane of every statistic. I do want a chapter word counter though, just for convienience sake. Also, like others have said, a 1000-2500 word range for a chapter is for me optimal.
