[Pulpmeister]

From a practical production viewpoint, and a reader's, too many chapters makes for an enormous TOC. In a pbook, a Contents chapter list two pages long is a pain, and its a bigger pain on an ereader.

Unless it's a very big book--150,000 words or more-- I would hesitate to go over 30 chapters. My ideal is about 20 or better yet around 12, but there's no reason why you can't have a lot of subchapters, which don't appear in the TOC.

Another thing worth thinking about. Do you need titles for chapters? There may be valid reasons in some books, but for the most part I am happy to have no titles, just numbers: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc. (And please, no Roman numerals. I can read them, I was taught them at school, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the Roman Empire is no more.)

As to length od chapter, it depends entirely on the narrative itself. Look at Anthony Powell, for instance. He wrote the 12-volume series "Music of Time", and the first novel in the sequence, A Question of Upbringing, had just 4 chapters for over 80,000 words. I think (without sifting through all 12 of them again) 4 chapters per novel was fairly standard, the maximum was I think 6.

But then, each chapter consisted of a long, carefully-plotted and worked out scene, usually with numerous characters present, or coming and going.

At the other extreme, E Phillips Oppenheim thought nothing of 50 or more chapters in a 90,000 word novel.

And, famously, Terry Pratchett seldom bothers with chapters at all, diving straight into the action and switching with great frequency between locations, characters and even times. His books are very difficult to get to work satisfactorily in ebook form due to the difficulty of getting that little navigation bar on the bottom working without chapter breaks.

I once tried on one of my Pratchett ebooks. Put the entire text into HTML, then arbitrarily divided the text into 20 roughly equal sections at convenient breaks, inserted an invisible anchor, and made a TOC for myself where, instead of chapters, I had approximate word count. Eg Position 6,000. Then recompiled as a Mobi.

It worked, but wasn't worth the effort.