Authors Are Not Entitled to Readers, Either

[rowyn]

There's been commentary circulating on Twitter for some months now about how important it is to authors that readers buy the early books in an incomplete series. Things to the effect of 'If you refuse to buy book 2 before book 3 is out, the publisher will cancel the contract and book 3 will never come out and it will be ALL YOUR FAULT'.
Every time I

Comments

[terrycloth]

Or write your books so that they work standalone even if the overarching plot takes multiple books to finish? I guess that sort of falls under (a).

[rowyn]

That works too!

[tuftears]

That's the strategy I favor! Even if you have Big Stuff going on, I prefer each book to have a small arc of its own that gets resolved at the end. The heroes make *some* progress. A cliffhanger can come at the end of the arc, within the same book, and at that point it comes across as a 'teaser for the next book', but not having an arc would just feel... incomplete.

[rowyn]

I admit, that improves my tolerance for Part II of V, too. And is one of the reasons I wouldn't break A Rational Arrangement or Silver Scales into two books: there'd be no arc-for-each-book, no sense in which the book was a complete individual unit.

[tuftears]

Just so! Honestly, David Weber's Honor Harrington books are starting to frustrate me in this respect, it doesn't feel like he's adhering so much anymore to each book having an arc but rather, that it's becoming soap operatic.

[rowyn]

Yeah. I often quit series after a handful of books, and that issue may be part of it. :/ But I think a lot of people like the soap-opera-style fic, too.

[terrycloth]

OH YEAH. And it's worse because he keeps referring to things that happened in a completely different series in the same universe and a lot of stuff makes no sense unless you read all of it.

OTOH the newest stuff I've read is the prequels Timothy Zahn is writing and they have an arc for each book so far.