So the other day, my successful web novel author friends gave me some advice. And I’m sharing that with y’all. Works that are published online for free can be monetized through Patreon (avid readers can read chapters in advance – its simple enough) but not all stories will work in this format.
Web novels require almost consistent word counts per chapter. It is advisable in web novels to publish 2,000 words per chapter, and maybe 6,000 to 8,000 words a week or more total. This means multiple chapters per week, or one humongous chapter every week.
This scared me. I have a day job. I can’t easily commit to writing 2,000 words a day for my readers. A blog is easy, but a story can be tough, too.
So my friends advised me to prepare a reservoir of chapters for my future web novel. Two ways around this: I can finish the web novel before I publish it online, a chapter at a time, OR I can finish many chapters, outline the heck out of the rest, and publish a chapter at a time while writing what follows a few chapters later simultaneously.
Still a scary endeavor. If readers pay you for advance access, you need to be able to deliver that.
Some web novels can reach a million words due to the length of the series. But traditional novels are somewhere between 60,000 to 120,000 words, depending on genre and publisher. My novel, Hunting the Rememberer: Chimera Anamnesis, clocks in at 81,000 words or so. Its my teenage child, after fifteen years of working on it whenever I have free time from my day job. So I’ll likely pick another story for web novel publishing later on… More on that tomorrow.