Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
I'm not the target market for this kind of book, but offhand I can think of two reasons for tanking series sales.
The first is killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Authors liked series because the books were pre-sold, but readers got tired of serious that just kept spinning their wheels and got nowhere, or worse, never concluded. They got wary; they won't invest in a series without some assurance that the series will both maintain the pace and conclude.
And the flip side of pre-sold is that any series will lose readers by attrition for various reasons, but books subsequent to the first won't add readers. It's built-in obsolescence.
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One way series can hurt an author that is completely unrelated to piracy: Go check out the author I mentioned,
Jeremy Robinson on Amazon.
He writes schlocky super-science thrillers and bug-eyed monster books that look like a lot of fun. But then most of them are followed by the dreaded parenthesis. You know. The ones that say (A Such and Such book). And he wrote several series concurrently. When you look at a list of his books, it's easy to get overwhelmed. Even the books without the parentheses may be part of a series, but not labelled as such. I see that and just decide to skip him altogether.
Also, reading a novel that is basically a Godzilla movie might be fun. But I don't want to read five books of it.