Quote:
Originally Posted by anamardoll
Heh.
To be honest, I think it's sort of The Changing Face Of The Business. We've had a few series do mega-well for themselves -- The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Twilight, Harry Potter, Hunger Games -- and so in standard business logic, this is the new thing.
And, of course, I think publishers have always liked series in the sense that they're a sort of "guaranteed" income -- I keep buying Deathlands even though they're up to 102 now and I've read only about 30. 
Heck, some READERS like series, as long as it's done in the right way. I'm nearer completion of my stand-alone novel right now, and at least 3 of my beta readers have cheerfully demanded spin-off books for the dark-horse characters in the book. Tellingly, they all three demanded different books for different characters.
If their desires were indicative of my hypothetical readership at large, I could have a series there, IF I had the inclination to follow it and did the work to do it properly. Those are tricky, but as a wanna-be self-publisher, I could make that decision with a little more freedom than if I'd signed on a dotted line promising three more books already. So there's that.
But also there's a tendency in the publishing world to shove people into boxes and series do that very handily. It's not just "your first book was sci-fi, now you're a sci-fi author", it's full on "your first book was His Dark Potter Files, now you're that series from now on." |
And I think that sucks. I would be more for stand alone novels within the same world that is somewhat like a series.
Andre Norton's Witch World is great for this. She used a great deal of an entire world...not in a "quest" but in multiple different stories and characters on different continents - some of whom know absolutely nothing about the other people, lands, etc.
Mercedes Lackey used to do this but seems to have started to go the route of others now.