Forum / Request: Word Count in Story Listings

• 
  Micah Dean Hicks

  Oct 05, 10:11pm

  Hey guys, really great thing you've got here. I have a small suggestion.

  In the listings for stories, it has the author, title, # views, # comments, and # favorites.

  I think this info block should also include word count. Here's why:

  As writers, I think we're more interested in how often the story is read rather than how many times the page is viewed. If I have five minutes or ten minutes to kill, open a story that sounds interesting, and find that it's fairly lengthy, I'm not going to read it. But, my view was counted just the same as if I did read the whole thing.

  Knowing how long a story is before I ever view it would be a deciding factor in whether or not I opened it to begin with. Then the authors can more safely assume that X views means X reads, which is what we're really interested in, I think.

  Also, this site rocks. I love it. My friends are queuing up and calling dibs on my first invites. I'm excited to see what all you guys do with it.

  Thanks!
  Micah

• 
  Jürgen Fauth

  Oct 07, 10:18am

  Thanks for the kind words and the suggestion, Micah. We haven't added the word count to the listings so far because we're trying to keep the front page us uncluttered as possible -- but I do see that it might be useful. We'll mull it over.

• 
  Dulce Maria Menendez

  Oct 08, 06:51am

  I don't think that is a good idea based on the motive. What if someone here writes another War and Peace and nobody clicks on it because of the word count? Also most poems will fall under the lower word count automatically so you would be clicking on poems when maybe you wanted to find flash fiction. So if anything at all should be done about the request above, it should probably be an option for the writer to choose the category the work falls under - such as poem, short story, flash fiction or what have yous.

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