I am thinking about the buying habits of readers, and trying to subdivide them into several categories, in relation to a single author's works
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Seems reasonable. Mostly I think of it more like 'I really like this author and want to read everything', 'I kind of like this author and I'll at least follow this series but I don't know if I want to read the rest of his stuff', 'I like this author's sci-fi but not his historical fiction', and the far-too-common 'I used to like this guy but his recent stuff really sucks'.
Then there's 'I like this author a lot and wanted to read everything but he/she wrote way too much and I got overwhelmed and just gave up entirely'. Which describes at least three authors.
I used to go on author kicks where I'd just read EVERYTHING by one author that I liked. I got on a kick for Diana Wynne Jones back in 2003 or so and read 30 books by her in the next six months. I did that with Bujold at one point, too. I haven't read everything by Sanderson, but most of his work. But yes, the fact that I have easy access to a huge variety of work makes me feel less motivated to hunt down the Sanderson books I haven't gotten to yet, say. I gave up on Song of Ice and Fire is when I realized I'd have to re-read the first three books before I could read the new one(s), and I was not motivated to do so. (It didn't help that the people I know who'd read book 4 were unimpressed by it, back in the days before the TV show.)
I used to be very author-completionist. Authors I read as a teenager, I read EVERYTHING (that the library had). And ones I really liked, I would buy what the library didn't. I think I just had more time as a teenager, and fewer books: I used to reread a lot, too (still do, but less so. There was a time when I could quote huge swaths of books I liked, or play memory games based on recalling and identifying dialogue snippets).
Possibly Madeleine L'Engle was the first author to break that for me: having finished all of her children's and YA books, I moved downstairs, and decided within five or ten pages of A Live Coal in the Sea that I was not old enough yet, and put it down. (This is also the first book I recall making a conscious decision not to finish
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Then there's 'I like this author a lot and wanted to read everything but he/she wrote way too much and I got overwhelmed and just gave up entirely'. Which describes at least three authors.
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I used to be very author-completionist. Authors I read as a teenager, I read EVERYTHING (that the library had). And ones I really liked, I would buy what the library didn't. I think I just had more time as a teenager, and fewer books: I used to reread a lot, too (still do, but less so. There was a time when I could quote huge swaths of books I liked, or play memory games based on recalling and identifying dialogue snippets).
Possibly Madeleine L'Engle was the first author to break that for me: having finished all of her children's and YA books, I moved downstairs, and decided within five or ten pages of A Live Coal in the Sea that I was not old enough yet, and put it down. (This is also the first book I recall making a conscious decision not to finish ( ... )
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I used to think it wasn't possible for an author I liked to write faster than I was willing to read, but no. I was wrong. It is. /o_o\
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