thanks for your reply. It's not for kudos farming, I've had other people express to me that they find long fics intimidating and prefer them to be broken up into smaller chunks. I worry that would give you possibly diminishing returns since not everyone would get the message that the fic has continued somewhere else, but I figured best to see what other people had to say.
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Honestly, it's six one way, a half dozen the other. Adding chapters is breaking them up into smaller chunks, maybe there's some newfangled difference between chapters as breaking points vs entire separate fics as breaking points for a story? You're going to be reading the same total word count one way or the other, whether it's 100k words in one fic divided into 50 chapters or 10 oneshots of 10k words each. Maybe this is just because I grew up in a family that encouraged reading from a young age but I often wonder how people who say they're intimidated by word count deal with actual physical novels where the word count isn't handed to you on a neat little stat block, and you just have to go in blind.
If I see a high word count I just divide that total by how many chapters there are and take that as the average. Using the above hypothetical, 100k words into 50 chapters is 2k words a chapter, on average. That's a nice easy bite sized chunk I could read before bed. Maybe even two chapters if I wanted to set aside the time for it. I do not, however, want to go through 50 separate oneshots of 2k words each. That would put me off of reading a story more than a high word count.
I tend to keep fics open on a mobile browser page to read a little bit each night before bed, and not having to switch back and forth between multiple works for one continuing story makes it a lot less of a hassle. And one of the comments in your poll brings up a good point; single fics are a lot easier to download for offline reading rather than trying to bundle several smaller ones together and keep them organised. I started as a reader on AO3 before I started publishing my own work, and ease of search/dowloading is something I try to keep in mind.
Generally speaking, I think that a continuous story arc should be contained to one fic. Whether that story takes you 1.5k or 150k words to tell, it should all stay packaged together. Or there's the series option...which will still tell you the total word count, and if the word count is really the biggest stumbling block here that's not going to change. At least a series will tell you if there's other works you've missed if you drop into the middle of it somehow, to your point of diminishing returns.
Idk. Maybe people aren't thinking to do the math of "X number of words divided by X number of chapters equals X average words per chapter" and then going from there, they just see that six digit word count and are freezing like a deer in the headlights. Maybe doing that might help people get past their sticker shock.
And I'll freely admit that I'm not above looking for just a little short oneshot before bed! If I see longer word counts, that's more of a dilemma of time and emotional commitment to get into something New, rather than just balking at having to read a lot of words.
I hope this helped to elaborate my tags and answer your initial question a bit better!
