Group Scenes into Chapters
Now that I have an idea of the content of each scene and how long they will be, I can group them into chapters. I try to keep all of the chapters about the same size, and I don't like to make them too long. I try to keep them at around 3k to 5k each, so I aim for about 20 to 30 chapters. So part of the puzzle is figuring out how to group the scenes by size to keep them relatively consistent.
The other part of the puzzle is making sure I group the scenes according to what is going on in them. I generally don't like switching POV characters in the middle of a chapter unless they are characters who are already interacting with one another, and I want to get a different perspective. The only other time I will do this is when I'm building up to the climax to build suspense.
I always like to end each chapter with a cliffhanger, so I also keep this in mind as I'm grouping the scenes. Sometimes I will even split a scene in half to do this if I can keep the consistency with word counts and changes of scene and/or POV characters.
So what I do is create folders inside each book, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and so on, and then I move the scenes into the appropriate folders. After that, I get a word count for each chapter. While it's not the final word count (obviously), it will give me an idea as to whether the chapters aren't going to have too much of a word count gap. I don't want one chapter to be 2k words and another 6k words. I will make adjustments as I need to, but sometimes I just have to go with it depending on the content of each scene.