Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Although everyone is more than welcome to their own definitions, I do find it odd when people want to use the word standalone to describe individual installments of a series--regardless of the type of series it is. In my world there is:
stand alone: reserved for true one-off books that are not a part of any series. It's important to me to reserve this term for the situation described because of the nature of the word itself. It makes no sense to me to have degrees of "standaloneishness." Standalone-standalone; series installment standalone; nearly-standalone; mostly-standalone; sorta-standalone--these are all weird distinctions to me. A bending of a clearly defined word in order to allow it to encompass something it shouldn't be encompassing. There are better words to describe books that don't fall into the standalone archetype. Like ...
Self-contained (or episodic): books that contain a complete arc, but are part of some greater whole, like a series or shared universe. While they may tell a complete story, there are also references from previous books, or setup for future books, or unresolved minor plot-points or teases that will get resolved in other volumes. That some people may be willing to overlook the "grand scheme" (for lack of a better term), or don't care about keeping the grand scheme in strict order has no bearing on the fact that the author has chosen to insert several primarily self-contained books into a larger whole. In other words: you can't turn a self-contained book that's part of a series into a standalone book by not caring that it's not really a standalone book. It's not really about you.
Non-episodic (or serial): books that don't contain a complete arc. They pick up where a previous book left off and often end with major unresolved plotlines and/or cliffhangers.
There's no reason, in my mind, to call a book a "standalone" when said book's author clearly intended it to be a part of a series or collective. There's better words to describe such things.
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Both Linwood Barclay and Harlan Coben have written books that have been set in the same fictional milieu and/or have re-used some secondary characters. I would still call them stand-alone books.
They have also written books that would fit in your "self-contained" category, and those are markedly different from the ones that simply share a milieu.