Anything over 4k and below 10k is ideal to me. Chapters above 15k is usually a chore to read with a bunch of filler. I'd much rather have smaller but more frequent updates than longer chapters where months go by without anything.

 

Sitra Ahra suffers a similar fate, being 360k words to cover just year 1 and 2. Could have easily been half of that and probably still felt bloated. Average chapter size is like 12k words as well, which is far too much in my opinion.

 

Averaging all of my Fanfiction.net chapters, it comes out to nearly 6.5K. That's really where I try to land, although I don't hold myself to that. AUT is a little less than 20K after 3 chapters, so I stay consistently in the 6 to 7 range.

As for other people's stories, I think 10K is pushing it unless its a one shot. You can read 5K in one sitting and not be tired, but only really, really great (rarely updating) stories can pull of those huge chapters.

 

For me it actually depends on the current situation I am in. Right now I prefer works at 40k to 100k words because I know I can read them in two or three days travelling to work. During holidays I don't mind the length.

But then, yeah, it depends on the setting and the year. I fondly remember "After the End" with 632k words but I frown at every first year fic with more than 150k.

 

I guess it depends on if the wordcount actually conveys something, or is just useless padding.

 

Read this a month back. Holds up pretty well even after 14 years. One of the best (the best?) in terms of writing quality, and excellent characterizations of the main characters, especially Ron and Draco. The angst gets a bit tedious at times though. I think my version (the pdf one) was much longer, it had a lot of stuff written by guest authors in-between actual chapters.

Anyway, what this thread seems to be lacking is actual average chapter length of best/popular works. I'll calculate this for some of my favorite HP ones :

Around 6-10k seems to be the norm. The shortest length is 5.13k, and I think that story was written all beforehand, as was Hogwarts Houses Divided.

It might be worth noting the earlier chapters of most of the works (OTWTG, The Phoenix and the Serpent, PotDK, Song of the Trees) are much shorter than the latest ones, and the updates were much more frequent then. The last chapter of OTWTG was around 27k IIRC, which is perhaps necessary, given Mira Mirth's once-a-year updates and pre-fixed number of chapters.

 

For me, it depends on the update rate. If it's frequent, 5-10k is fine, but if it's something that's very sporadic, like for instance Traveler, I appreciate the giant ~25-30k word chapters.

Though, I suppose I might prefer faster updates with fewer words?

 

Once per month updates with 10k word-length are fine with me.

Once every two weeks with 3-5k words I'm not fond of, but I'll tolerate.

An update with 2k words after a hiatus that lasted many months, if not a multitude of years, just pisses me off.

I've read one fic that was recommended in the AR recently, and its latest chapter was over 20k words, but holy fuck, most of that was just pointlessly dragged out, and could have been much more concise, and faster with pacing.

I don't think I really have anything against lengthy chapters so long as stuff happens and we get to see shit move forward in them.

 

Fanfiction authors: write 2k per chapter and update every day. Mad reviews, yo.

 

When I started reading fanfiction I avoided anything below 5k per chapter. That being said I started writing my first story recently and I'm doing the whole 2k words daily. I'm not claiming my work measures up to those recommended above, I'd argue against it really, but reading comments and reviews is encouraging and motivates me to keep writing. If updating daily can produce more words for an author, even if they are in smaller chunks, I'm inclined to support it.

90% of everything is shit, just because a lot of terrible stories have short chapters doesn't mean they all do and I think strictly following filters like words/chapter risks eliminating a lot of otherwise decent stories.