Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
The endings I dislike most are those that tell you the story, which wasn't great to begin with, will continue in the second book of the series. The author should have given up long before thinking about a sequel!
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According to some authors and publishers I've talked to, the real problem is that the author has just written a very long book, and the economics of dead tree books is such that it's too long to economically print in a single book, and the publisher makes the author split it into two books. Unfortunately, this also means that even if the author has submitted the entire work to the publisher, it will still take about two years to see both parts in print if there's a hardcover/trade edition and mass-market PB, because the publisher wants to milk the more expensive edition for at least 6-9 months before releasing the MMPB of the first half and then wait a bit before releasing the second half in hardcover/trade.
Of course, this doesn't seem to explain why some publishers are able to make money by publishing big honking omnibus editions, maybe they're paying a lot less in royalties.