More Posts vs. Longer Posts

I tend to write long posts. The main point of my blog, as I see it, is my series Those Magnificent Men and their Atomic Machines, which currently averages about 5,000 to 8,000 words, posted once every 2-3 months. But I've noticed that my shorter posts (i.e., less than 2,000 words) tend to get considerably more traffic and provoke more comments on Twitter.

The thing is, I like writing long. I blog about history, and I like being able to go into the background and the context and the weird little details. (The uncharitable might rephrase that as "I like to hear myself talk.")

It's not exactly a pressing issue - I'm not trying to sell a book or ad space or anything - but every writer likes to be read, and most like to please the readers. So, I'm asking your opinion: what are the advantages and disadvantages of more-but-shorter versus fewer-but-longer posts?

Undercover said:

If it's shown you get more views and comments, perhaps break the post in two? Like Part 1 and Part 2 of the same chapter? Could that work maybe?

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ralf58 said:

As Lyra Jean suggested, can't you break up the long posts into subsections, and post them one at a time?

There is a second advantage to that. You could end each one with a teaser: "Tomorrow, I cover . . . " Then you might start to build return traffic.

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I've thought about that, and I may try it in future. My current approach is not really conducive to it, though - my main schtick is weird technology ideas from the atompunk days, stuff like using hydrogen bombs to dig harbors or using nuclear reactors to melt through the ground. I generally do something like Context (2,000 words) - Weird Concept (2,000 words) - More Context (2,000 words), which means breaking it up would mean at least two pure-context pretty-picture-less posts, which seems suboptimal. Although obviously my writing style is not immutable.

ralf58 said:

You can still write the way you prefer. Write your posts in a Word doc and make them as long as you want. Then come back to them with an editor's eye and figure out how to chunk them.

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I generally do write in word docs, but I'm planning to move away from that. For some reason, the formatting gets screwed up when I copy and paste into Blogspot's post editor - it looks fine in the editor, but if I actually post it the font sizes are all weird and don't match what I set them to. I can fix it by changing all the font sizes to something else and then changing them back again, but I have to do that to each individual paragraph to avoid messing up the formatting on the citations. It's a massive pain.

Casey Karp said:

All true and valuable, but the counter here is that frequent posts can be just as draining to readers as long posts. I've been posting daily, and the most common feedback I've gotten is that it's too difficult to keep up with the volume of posts.

Regular posting seems to be good, but "Tomorrow, I cover..." may get you into trouble too.

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I don't think I'm at any risk of posting daily anytime in the near future. My current goal is to build up to weekly posts, and I've got a ways to go for that. Part of the problem is that this is very research-intensive, and interlibrary loan takes time, and so I generally have to start planning even short articles at least 2-3 weeks before I actually post them.

Casey Karp said:

Perhaps write long, split them and post once a week, rather than the current semi-regular "once every 2-3 months"?

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I do do shorter articles occasionally, not just the big ones - I'm currently averaging 1-2 articles per month. Hence my discomfited surprise that the short ones, which I thought of as throw-aways, get far, far more hits.

ishtar'sgate said:

One thing I noticed about doing history articles is that they were primarily read by students looking for information.

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If there's a class out there that could use what I write, I would seriously like to take it. I figure my target market is nerds into atompunk and weird technology.

ishtar'sgate said:

Keeping the print a good size and having the article succinct but info-packed and easy to move through using paragraph headings seemed to garner more reads. I also tried to include 2 or 3 pictures depending on the subject.

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Pictures are no problem. Government document servers are a wonderful thing - especially since gov docs aren't copyrighted. The Atomic Energy Commission wasn't as in to concept art as the defense department, but they've got some, and there's usually lots and lots of schematics and graphs and maps and so on.

Casey Karp said:

How disappointing! Aren't we all trying to work up to more words, faster, and better?

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The writing isn't the problem, for short articles I can usually knock out the writing in a few hours. (Plus several days of obsessive editing and fact rechecking and fighting with blogger's formatting.) It's the reading. And getting the books to read.

Casey Karp said:

Maybe the takeaway is that your style is well suited to the shorter pieces, or that you take a different approach to them. At the risk of sounding like a know-it-all, in your position I'd be looking to see what I was doing differently with the short pieces (other than writing less words) and seeing whether I could do more of that in the longer pieces.

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Hm. Let me think about that.

I think I'm going to do my next long post as a single long post, since it's the second part of something I've already done part 1 of. But I'll try splitting up the one after that into more bite-sized chunks.