Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
My first experience with an abandoned series was Roland Green's Wandor series. That series was abandoned in the middle of things with book 4. I never bought another Roland Green book. There is the difference between a series where each book is more or less a stand alone (Bond and Hornblower, for example) and a series where the plot line is one continuous book (Wheel of Time).
When I told Jim Baen some years later why I refused to buy books written by Roland Green, he called me harsh. Me, I look at it from the stand point of if you aren't willing to see the series through, then learn how to write self contained books. I started this series when I was in high school and spent my lunch money to buy some of them. Would it really have been difficult to look at the numbers and figure out that you needed to wrap the series up early because it wasn't earning enough to continue? It's not like they dropped the series because only book 4 didn't do well and the rest did great. This is also the reason that many refuse to buy a book from a series until it's been completed.
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Sorry. Please allow me to rephrase: I'd be happy to see more authors avoid writing series altogether.
I didn't mean authors should abandon a series mid-stream.
Stephen King is my go-to on this. He mostly writes stand alone books. He'll drop Easter Eggs in them calling back to other stories in an offhand way. But you don't have to have read The Shining to enjoy Misery, for instance.
He has one series, The Dark Tower, that acts as a sort of spine to his universe, but skipping them won't impact any of his other books (except maybe for Insomnia. I remember not liking that because it relied too heavily on Dark Tower mythos).