The Web Novel Drop Test
As Bard-In-Chief, I cannot tell you how many times my adoring public gathers around me while I am enjoying a bowl of soup to enquire of my wisdom.
Why they wait for me to be having soup, I cannot say. I can be chowing down on burgers or eating fish and chips on the beach without a single soul recognising me.
You would think they would come to the conventions?
Nope.
The meet-and-greets I spend months putting together?
Not a person turns up.
But the moment people catch me in blessed repose, blowing onto a hot spoon, suddenly it is ‘Bard-In-Chief’ this and ‘Bard-In-Chief’ that.
Baffling.
Yet as Bard-In-Chief, I have a responsibility to my adoring public. And the number one question they ask while I am busy fishing for croutons has to be:
How many chapters should you give a piece of web fiction before deciding whether to drop it?
It is my hope that by addressing the question today, by tomorrow, I will be left to my soup in peace.
Why This Question?
Web fiction differs from traditionally published novels in multiple ways. While the traditional route has quality control built into its model, no such barrier exists when posting one’s work directly online.
For every polished piece like Mother of Learning, The Light Fanatics, Shadows Over Arcadia, The Glass Wizard and C.A.R.O.L.I.N, there are a thousand works of fiction lacking any rhythm, rigour or reason for reading.
For every Shadow Slave, where you can trust that the author knows where he is taking the story, there are a thousand novels with abandoned plots and enough filler to make a Kardashian blush.
Let me preface this by saying that I love web fiction. I love how anyone with a story in their heart and a keyboard to jot it down with can bring that story to the masses without the traditional barriers to entry.
But let us not pretend those barriers were entirely arbitrary.
Some doubtlessly were. Any that existed on the basis of race, sex or class discrimination were unquestionably unjust.
Others were simply the result of a very harsh truth:
Not everybody with a story to tell has the capacity to tell that story.
Most web serials come without a price tag. Yet I would argue that does not make them free.
They cost your limited time.
They demand your emotional investment.
They hope to draw you into the logic of their world, all the while the author is one negative comment away from abandoning that world without a word.
If an author wishes to make you a committed reader, I think it is fitting to seek an equal commitment.
A commitment to quality.
To consistency.
And to the kind of story that makes you want to keep reading even when it is long past time for you to stop.
So how do you know when you have found that story?
The unsettling truth is, you do not.
Not until the very end.
But there are clues you can follow.
I outline them below.
The Prose Pass
Polished prose does not necessarily make for an engaging story. But incomprehensible prose acts as an absolute barrier to one.
There is a reason for this.
Only the initiated could ever truly understand, but I will put it in a way that should allow the uninitiated a degree of comprehension.
You see, you cannot enjoy what you do not understand.
Okay, that is only half true. I could not tell you what that Thai masseuse was doing down there, but I enjoyed it greatly.
Sadly, the wonders of Thai massage do not extend to the written word.
For me, incomprehensible prose is an early sign to drop a novel.
But the prose does not have to be incomprehensible for it to be incompatible with how you enjoy a story.
Maybe the prose is too dense or, conversely, embarrassingly simple.
Perhaps there is a lack of internality that resists your capacity to engage with the characters.
There might be nothing wrong with the prose at all, but it is written in an experimental style that simply does not gel with your specific tastes.
If a novel cannot clear the Prose Pass, it is a good sign that you should pass on it.
A Chapter 1–3 ‘Okay Moment’
To understand what an Okay Moment is, we must return to the Thai massage.
Picture this: the masseuse is working your lower back. It feels alright. But suddenly, they do the move.
For moral and legal reasons, I cannot explain the move.
For the brothers and rare sisters who have frequented The Blessed Mango Bodyworks down on Fifth Avenue…
Every Fifth Avenue.
I need not explain more.
As for the guiltless masses, the Okay Moment is the moment during your experience that makes you say:
‘Okay—I get it. This is the hype.’
It is the moment something in the novel clicks with you.
Maybe it is a genre subversion or a particular mechanic you have not seen before. It could be as simple as really polished dialogue, or as complex as a worldbuilding conceit that snaps the whole setting into focus.
What that Okay Moment is—and it very well could be unique to you—I argue it should appear within the first three chapters.
By then, you should understand the promise of the novel.
Maybe not the full picture, but the promise, at least.
It does not necessarily follow that you should drop a novel if you cannot see its promise early. But it is a sign.
An author who knows what they are doing knows an early reader’s attention is fleeting. If they fail to account for that, there is no reason to assume they know what they are doing with the rest of their story.
Chapter 10: Execution
Maybe something gripped you in the early chapters.
That does not mean the author is capable of living up to the premise.
By Chapter 10, that is what I am looking for: whether the story has built towards its promise or meandered away from it.
To return to the Thai massage…
Later.
I guess I should finish writing this piece first.
By Chapter 10, I expect momentum.
That does not necessarily mean explosions, deaths, betrayals or a protagonist unlocking the Divine Heaven-Eating Emperor Dragon Bloodline.
Momentum simply means that the story is moving.
Characters should be pursuing something. Conflicts should be developing. Questions should be receiving answers even as new ones emerge. The world should feel larger than it did ten chapters ago.
Most importantly, I should understand what kind of story I am reading.
If the opening promised political intrigue and ten chapters later everybody is still discussing breakfast arrangements, something has gone wrong.
Likewise, if the story promised a slow, character-driven drama, I am not going to condemn it because nobody has suplexed a dragon yet.
Execution has to be judged against the promise the story itself made.
And by Chapter 10, I want some evidence that the author can actually deliver on that promise.
If that momentum never arrives, a reader does not owe a story two hundred chapters and a glossary before it ‘really gets good’.
You gave it ten chapters.
You did your part.
The First Arc Change
If you have committed yourself to an entire arc, next it is time to ask whether anything has meaningfully changed.
This, for me, is the most important test.
A good first arc should leave the story in a different place from where it began.
The protagonist might be stronger.
They might be weaker.
They might have gained allies, made enemies, discovered something about the world, changed their ambitions or suffered the sort of catastrophic personal trauma that web-fiction authors call ‘character development’.
Something should be different.
An arc is not merely a collection of chapters occupying the same postcode.
It is a unit of narrative movement.
If I can finish an entire arc and reasonably ask, ‘What was the point of all that?’ then the story is in trouble.
This does not mean every arc needs to overthrow a government.
Sometimes the change is entirely internal.
A character learns to trust somebody.
A relationship shifts.
A mystery deepens in a way that changes how we understand earlier events.
The important thing is that the journey mattered.
If the first arc ends and the characters, stakes, relationships and direction are almost exactly where they started, you should seriously consider whether you want to spend another arc waiting for something to happen.
Because now you are no longer waiting for the story to begin.
You are reading the story.
So, How Long Should You Give It?
There is no magic chapter count.
I know.
You came all this way looking for wisdom and I have rewarded you with nuance.
My apologies.
But if you absolutely forced me to construct a rule, it would look something like this:
- The prose should work immediately.
- The promise should reveal itself within the first three chapters.
- The execution should become apparent by around Chapter 10.
- And by the end of the first major arc, something meaningful should have changed.
Failing one test does not necessarily condemn a story.
Perhaps the prose is rough but the ideas are extraordinary.
Maybe the opening is slow because the author is laying foundations for something more ambitious.
Perhaps somebody you trust has assured you that Chapter 27 contains the single greatest fictional sword fight since mankind first conceived of hitting one another with sharpened metal.
Fine.
Keep reading.
But recognise that you are extending credit.
And there eventually comes a point where the story has to repay it.
I do not subscribe to the idea that readers owe a novel endless patience.
‘It gets good eventually’ can be a perfectly reasonable defence of a story.
‘It gets good after seventy hours of your life’ is beginning to sound less like a recommendation and more like a hostage negotiation.
The question, ultimately, is not:
How many chapters should I give this story?
It is:
Has this story given me a reason to read one more?
If the answer remains yes, keep going.
If the answer becomes no, there are more stories online than any of us could finish in a hundred lifetimes.
Go find another.
And now that I have answered the question, I trust my adoring public will finally grant me some peace.
I have soup to finish.
And if one of you approaches me while I am holding a spoon, I swear I am switching to sandwiches for the rest of my natural-born life.
Clone_v2 is the Bard-in-Chief of Bardic Planet.
When he’s not defending his soup from unsolicited literary consultations, he writes original Web Fiction on Royal Road.
Check out Captured Sky—a brutal, high-stakes fantasy set in the unforgiving world of the Dungeon.
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