Apparently, puppy is not amused: A Discussion on Brand Name Authors
Blame Courtney for the title.
Bitch.
Well, it's been a good while since you've all been treated to a nice, long, Kate-style rant. Why, I believe there are some people now on my F-list who have never been treated to a Kate rant, and don't get the reference! Don't worry. You're not missing much. Anyways, lo, I am annoyed. BUT, I shall try and turn ( Read more... )
How much does an author owe their readers? How much do readers have a right to expect from the authors they've followed and supported over multiple installments? I absolutely can't fathom the idea that an author should only be limited to their first genre, they're only human of course, and just as reader's tastes change over the course of their life, of course an author's tastes can change in the same fashion
The only thing I think a published author owes their readers is in the case of a series. The series finish must be known before the first book is published. It should be planned, you should be capable of finishing it and it should be finished. Of course, this isn't always possible, look at poor Robert Jordan who will have a ghost writer finish his series after his death. Perhaps Terry Pratchett, who is also sick, is wondering about the fate of Disc World should he lose his abilities to write in the near future with the clarity he expects from himself.
Those are the only reasons a series should fall out of the hands of the original writer. An authors owes his/her audience a sense of completion on the journey they started together. That does NOT include all books thereafter. A writer would become truly stagnant if they produced formulaic stories that matched their first over and over again, only writing for one audience and expressing one side of themselves. Formulas grow stale, for authors that want to change themselves, challenge themselves and try something new, they are well within their rights to do it.
I do think that it's a bad idea for an author to be publishing more than one series at the same time. It's okay to have them developing, but I think it causes problems when you skip from one series to another and then don't find your way back for a long time. If you have fans of one series waiting while you expore another series in another genre...that can take years to get out of your system and you've just left your readers hanging there waiting for you to come back to your original series. An author who has done this is Isobelle Carmody and I can understand why her fans are pissed off given that they've all aged from the teenage girls they used to be when the series started, and the new book has only just been released. I suppose it's different when your target audience is young and you have a time limit to get them through before expecting them to keep reading a genre they may have outgrown (I say "may", because clearly I haven't).
Kalen, who's mostly talking about the kinda uproar we can all expect if JK Rowling ever dares write another book and its NOT in fact a new Potter-verse novel
Yeah...I see that going down like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle deciding to kill Sherlock Holmes and try something new. Real popular.
Oh, and HI KATE! :) Heh.
Reply
Although to be fair, almost all of her others series have been in similar genres, and share the same fanbase, so no fans have been left with nothing to follow while waiting for the next Obernewtyn.
Reply
Leave a comment