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

[ankewehner]

RE (e)... telling people that they should like something they dislike, i.e. telling them their taste is wrong, strikes me as a bad strategy. I'm probably taking it personally because I hate cliffhangers, but yeah. Answering "I don't like X" with "But you should!", no.

[rowyn]

Well, yes, "your taste is wrong" is a horrible approach to a conversation. That's not what I intended to refer to with (e). I meant "instead of tweeting 'Buy my clifhanger or you're ruining publishing' try 'I love reading cliffhangers because [X]'". Ie, do not confront people who hate cliffhangers with YOUR TASTE IS BAD AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD. Instead, talk generally about why this format works for you, personally. I am not interested in being lectured on why I'm wrong (I hate cliffhangers too), but I am usually willing to listen to people talk about why they love a thing, even if I do not like it. It's not likely to change my mind, no. But it is more likely than any other approach. :|

[ankewehner]

You know, this thread somehow for the first time led me to consider that maybe the end of the first Game of Thrones books was meant to be a cliffhanger, rather than something a mind I do not understand at all considers satisfying. The idea it might be meant as a cliffhanger literally never crossed my mind before.

I bounced off it extremely hard (as in "don't want to touch anything by the author ever again"), because at the end of a book what I want is some measure of satisfaction and closure, and any halfway decent character either dead or in deep [redacted] is the opposite of that.

[3rdragon]

Dovetailing with rowyn, selling a book on the positive aspects can also encourage readers who don't like a particular aspect but do like related aspects. I'm not a huge cliffhanger person either, but I do like the community and possibility for shared discussion that accompanies an unfinished story. The discussions I had about Harry Potter between the 6th and 7th books coming out were WAY better than any discussion I would have had if we'd just all gotten the entire 7 book set and read them all and talked about them. And the discussions my roommate and I had about Connie Willis's Blackout or during the A Rational Arrangement serial were likewise much better.

TL;DR: Not a fan of cliffhangers, but I like the community aspects of unfinished story. And talking up what you like about cliffhangers might remind me of the things I like and persuade me to join in even though there are cliffhangers.

[ankewehner]

I don't like speculating about things that someone else will write, because 1) I can't read minds, how would I know? and 2) school has taught me that guessing wrong means ridicule.

A comic series I still follow does "what will happen with [character] in the next issue?" "prompts" on social media, and I HATE it, because it feels to me just like the people who already know what will happen want to laugh behind their screens at people for guessing wrong.