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.

[threeringedmoon]

I'll purchase books in a series, but I start getting cranky if there is purportedly a story arc, but the novels stop contributing anything to resolve that story arc.

[rowyn]

Yeah, there is definitely a line between "I need 2000 pages to tell this story" and "I'm just using this gimmick to keep readers coming back". c_c

[whitefangedwolf]

*gets on soapbox*
If an author wants me to read and buy their multi-book epic series, they need to deliver books in a timely manner. I understand that it can take up to 3 years to publish the next book in a epic series. If it's good, I don't mind waiting that long. However, if the last two books of a series took 5-6 years to show up and there's no sign of the next one after 5 years, well, I'm not interested in starting it. If I'm going to start reading an epic series, I want to be fairly confident that the author is actually going be able to deliver a conclusion before dying of old age.

[rowyn]

Yeah. It's perfectly fair to say that the author is not obligated to Write Faster, and they're not. But by the same token, readers are not required to keep buying into a series regardless of how long it is between installments. -_-

[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.