This week, I would like to take a break from promoting my books and complaining about utterly asinine things to ask a question of my fellow authors: what is the perfect chapter size? If you google it, the answer is said to be between 2,000 to 5,000 words, which is a pretty big variation. They say shorter chapters of 1,000 to 2,000 words creates faster pacing, but I just can’t imagine writing a chapter as short as 1500 words. It’s the same problem I have writing flash fiction: who can say anything meaningful in that short of a period of time? What was the point? The closest I have ever come was the current work I have, which has come close on some points, but I’ve combined chapters to avoid that.

Longer chapters are generally allowed for character depth, but longer is generally 4,000 to 8,000 words. When I started out writing Pandemonium, I would write chapters that would be 12,000 words long, so too long in other words. Some of my chapters would be stories in and of themselves. Needless to say, that was back when I was just learning how to do this stuff.

With Pandemonium, I’ve recently reworked them to between 2,000 to 4,000 words. This was to avoid some of the rougher transitions between scene changes. However, I’m actually liking how the pacing and development works with those size chapters, and now I’m applying this principle to my other works.

What do you guys think? What is the best chapter length? Does it depend on the type of book? Obviously, it depends on your audience. Adult books will have longer chapters than young adult or middle grade books. Should science fiction have longer or shorter chapters than horror? What about high fantasy? Tell me your thoughts.