Nathan Bransford - The Forums

And I love the new signature, Brian ;-)

I think chapters should be as long or short as they need to be. If your book's accepted for representation by an agent and publication by a publishing house, the agent or editor might request changes, but that happens no matter what the original length of chapters.

I think it all depends on the genre and how you want to handle the pacing. I've read some fantasy books with very long chapters followed by a one pager. In some instances, the one page chapter was distracting and interrupted the flow of the book. However, in another book, it just helped to move things along. With YA and Romance, the chapters were relatively short. This made it a lot easier to find a stopping point for the reader. I think I'd be more nervous about an overly long chapter than a short chapter...

Here's a link I thought it was pretty helpful...

http://writing-novels.suite101.com/arti ... o_chapters

susaninvt wrote:I think I'd be more nervous about an overly long chapter than a short chapter...

I certainly get nervous about this. I enjoy reading shorter-chaptered books because a lot of my reading is done on a train, or in line somewhere... and I hate having to stop halfway through something really ponderous! Right now my first chapter is 3300 words and I feel like that's far, far too much for a first chapter. Even though it's followed by two 1000-worders... and then a 5000 word monstrosity after that. Yuk! I have a lot of whittling ahead.