story experiment

I think there's a definite difference in browsing behaviour between printed and electronic media.

There's a bit more of an investment in taking down a book from the shelves and skimming it (or getting stuck into the places where the book falls open naturally for some strange reason) than in being able to open a story merely by clicking in the comfort of your own home, and this, I think, will make one more willing to have a skim of a longer paper-based work.
Having said that, the minimum length for a printed story is longer than that for an electronic one, so perhaps we expect a book to be of a certain length and are quite happy with seeing that 20mm block of paper and knowing that we're not going to read all of it, nor yet be expected to standing in the bookshop unless we take the effort of buying it or borrowing it from the library.

There's another effect online in that when I see "Story Title - Part 1" I wonder how many more chapters there are going to be, and if it is even finished. Now, this is easy enough to find out here, but reading decisions are made pretty quickly, and the choice between 4,000 words immediately or a longer story over the course of a week is an easy one to make unless one admires the work of the longer work's author

I know I tend to write longer stories which take longer to weed through to find the spanking scene(s). I almost feel like I should add an author's note: "for those of you who want to skip directly to the spanking, it takes place halfway through, right after...." After all, if that's all they're interested in, why make them slog through all that boring plot?

I've done that also. I like a good plot that can stand on its own even without the spanking, and sometimes I've gotten carried away. One story I wrote was over 9700 words and I got wrapped up in an emotional tale and didn't get around to including a modest spanking until about three-quarters through it. I don't think it even qualified as a "spanking story" and was never posted in the library.

Blackbirch, your comments are spot on. I feel exactly the same. That is, I don't view myself as a great writer, but just a teller of tales that interest me.

I also tend towards serials, because I like a lot of characters and the interactions between these characters. If you do that in a single story, you just waste an enormous amount of time introducing the characters. In serials, you can weave characters in and out at will.