Poll: CFC Post Length

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

Length is an integral part of creative works, but it behaves differently online than in hardcopy. There is no hard limit online, as there is in a paper book or magazine, but readers tend to have shorter attention spans. Cyberfunded creativity (aka crowdfunding) has many different manifestations. Let's explore how we are handling, or would like to handle, issues of length. (This focuses mainly on text rather than images.)

[Poll #1420643]

Comments

Try this...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

If you have been running one or more CFC projects for a while, please consider linking to this poll and encouraging your audience to participate. That should help broaden our survey base and improve accuracy.

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

... this poll mainly covers text-based CFC projects. This is the territory I know best. Perhaps you and/or other artists would make a poll for visual or text/visual CFC projects? I'm not sure what questions would be most useful there. The original question that inspired me to post this poll was about length of story installments.

[dulcinbradbury.livejournal.com]

I'm a compulsive reader. Chapter breaks don't stop me & I'll lose hours at a shot.

Short stories come to an end. I can put the book down (usually).

[cat-sanctuary.livejournal.com]

It all depends on the content. Some ideas work well as haiku. I mostly read books, and usually think in lengths from serious-magazine-article to book length.

Short-short pieces (like the typical blog post) work for Andrei Codrescu and Kathleen Norris, and for the stereotypical non-creative, non-informative blogger whose post really is an alternative to mailing out 57 postcards. But even online I'd say that any length is all right, as long as it's not broken up with intrusive ads, LJ-cuts, etc...in order to read it I need to print it out, and I want one click to print it all!

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>It all depends on the content. Some ideas work well as haiku. I mostly read books, and usually think in lengths from serious-magazine-article to book length.<<

That's true. The idea needs to match the format, in terms of scope.

Sadly, I suck at estimating length in fiction. In nonfiction, I can hit a word count target pretty well. In fiction, I have mistaken a trilogy idea for a short story idea.