Authors Are Not Entitled to Readers, Either

[rowyn]

There's been commentary circulating on Twitter for some months now about how important it is to authors that readers buy the early books in an incomplete series. Things to the effect of 'If you refuse to buy book 2 before book 3 is out, the publisher will cancel the contract and book 3 will never come out and it will be ALL YOUR FAULT'.

Every time I see this, I think of Neil Gaiman's famous blog post about George R. R. Martin, the one where he discusses how entitled it is for readers to expect authors to dedicate every working moment to producing the next book of an incomplete series.

I do not dispute either point. Publishers do cancel series when the early books don't sell well, regardless of whether or not the series is complete. It is futile at best and counterproductive at worst to browbeat an author because they are not Writing Fast Enough.

But I would like to submit it is also futile to browbeat readers who do not like the format in which you package your product. Envision the conversation like this:

Seller: Buy my chocolate!
Consumer: Oh, sorry, I don't like chocolate. More a vanilla person.
S: Well, in a few years I plan to stock vanilla!
C: Yay! I will buy your vanilla once you start selling it.
S: NO YOU HAVE TO BUY MY CHOCOLATE NOW OR I'LL NEVER BE ABLE TO MAKE VANILLA WHY DO YOU HATE VANILLA DON'T YOU KNOW THAT YOU PERSONALLY ARE DESTROYING THE VANILLA INDUSTRY ;__:
C: [... quietly leaves to buy vanilla from someone else]

Does this really seem like an effective strategy?

Yes, I am aware that it's easier for authors of epics to support themselves if they can sell their epics one book at a time and live on the proceeds from the last book while they write the next. However, "it is easier if" <> "the thousand-page epic will go away if this mode of publishing stops". J.R.R. Tolkien had finished all of The Lord of the Rings before any of it was published. Conversely, Charles Dickens wrote and published most of his novel as serials before they were published as single books. The fact that we currently have "unfinished epic" as a healthy publishing category while "unfinished novel" is only just starting to make a comeback has not stopped the latter from being written.

A market only works because it benefits both buyer and seller. There are lots of readers who don't have a problem with reading books in an unfinished series. If you are publishing Book [X] of [Y], those readers are your target market.  The readers who only want to read complete stories are not. Complaining about the latter group because they aren't supporting you RIGHT NOW doesn't change that RIGHT NOW you're not actually selling something they want.

You have several markteing options here!  You can:

(a) Sell standalone books
(b) Sell books in a series as each one is finished and rely on the support of people who like that format
(c) Release the series all at once at completion for readers who like binging
(d) Try to lure in the people who like completion as well as those who like series by having a quick publishing schedule
(e) Talk about how great incomplete series are! Seriously, books that end in cliffhangers are arguably the most successful book marketing strategy. Obviously many readers love them. If you want to convert the folks who don't, tell them why they should. Talk about how you savor the time between installments as a chance to fantasize about possible resolutions, or a way to connect with other readers and discuss the characters' current predicaments, or a way to get your fix in unintimidating bite-sized chunks, or whatever else it is that makes you love this style of storytelling.
(f) Whinge at potential readers about how the publisher is holding Book X+1 hostage unless they buy Book X RIGHT NOW.

Y'all can probably tell which strategy I would not recommend. -_-

Comments

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Or write your books so that they work standalone even if the overarching plot takes multiple books to finish? I guess that sort of falls under (a).

[rowyn]

That works too!

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

That's the strategy I favor! Even if you have Big Stuff going on, I prefer each book to have a small arc of its own that gets resolved at the end. The heroes make *some* progress. A cliffhanger can come at the end of the arc, within the same book, and at that point it comes across as a 'teaser for the next book', but not having an arc would just feel... incomplete.

[rowyn]

I admit, that improves my tolerance for Part II of V, too. And is one of the reasons I wouldn't break A Rational Arrangement or Silver Scales into two books: there'd be no arc-for-each-book, no sense in which the book was a complete individual unit.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Just so! Honestly, David Weber's Honor Harrington books are starting to frustrate me in this respect, it doesn't feel like he's adhering so much anymore to each book having an arc but rather, that it's becoming soap operatic.

[rowyn]

Yeah. I often quit series after a handful of books, and that issue may be part of it. :/ But I think a lot of people like the soap-opera-style fic, too.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

OH YEAH. And it's worse because he keeps referring to things that happened in a completely different series in the same universe and a lot of stuff makes no sense unless you read all of it.

OTOH the newest stuff I've read is the prequels Timothy Zahn is writing and they have an arc for each book so far.

[threeringedmoon.livejournal.com]

I'll purchase books in a series, but I start getting cranky if there is purportedly a story arc, but the novels stop contributing anything to resolve that story arc.

[rowyn]

Yeah, there is definitely a line between "I need 2000 pages to tell this story" and "I'm just using this gimmick to keep readers coming back". c_c

[whitefangedwolf.livejournal.com]

*gets on soapbox*
If an author wants me to read and buy their multi-book epic series, they need to deliver books in a timely manner. I understand that it can take up to 3 years to publish the next book in a epic series. If it's good, I don't mind waiting that long. However, if the last two books of a series took 5-6 years to show up and there's no sign of the next one after 5 years, well, I'm not interested in starting it. If I'm going to start reading an epic series, I want to be fairly confident that the author is actually going be able to deliver a conclusion before dying of old age.

[rowyn]

Yeah. It's perfectly fair to say that the author is not obligated to Write Faster, and they're not. But by the same token, readers are not required to keep buying into a series regardless of how long it is between installments. -_-

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

RE (e)... telling people that they should like something they dislike, i.e. telling them their taste is wrong, strikes me as a bad strategy. I'm probably taking it personally because I hate cliffhangers, but yeah. Answering "I don't like X" with "But you should!", no.

[rowyn]

Well, yes, "your taste is wrong" is a horrible approach to a conversation. That's not what I intended to refer to with (e). I meant "instead of tweeting 'Buy my clifhanger or you're ruining publishing' try 'I love reading cliffhangers because [X]'". Ie, do not confront people who hate cliffhangers with YOUR TASTE IS BAD AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD. Instead, talk generally about why this format works for you, personally. I am not interested in being lectured on why I'm wrong (I hate cliffhangers too), but I am usually willing to listen to people talk about why they love a thing, even if I do not like it. It's not likely to change my mind, no. But it is more likely than any other approach. :|

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

You know, this thread somehow for the first time led me to consider that maybe the end of the first Game of Thrones books was meant to be a cliffhanger, rather than something a mind I do not understand at all considers satisfying. The idea it might be meant as a cliffhanger literally never crossed my mind before.

I bounced off it extremely hard (as in "don't want to touch anything by the author ever again"), because at the end of a book what I want is some measure of satisfaction and closure, and any halfway decent character either dead or in deep [redacted] is the opposite of that.

[3rdragon]

Dovetailing with rowyn, selling a book on the positive aspects can also encourage readers who don't like a particular aspect but do like related aspects. I'm not a huge cliffhanger person either, but I do like the community and possibility for shared discussion that accompanies an unfinished story. The discussions I had about Harry Potter between the 6th and 7th books coming out were WAY better than any discussion I would have had if we'd just all gotten the entire 7 book set and read them all and talked about them. And the discussions my roommate and I had about Connie Willis's Blackout or during the A Rational Arrangement serial were likewise much better.

TL;DR: Not a fan of cliffhangers, but I like the community aspects of unfinished story. And talking up what you like about cliffhangers might remind me of the things I like and persuade me to join in even though there are cliffhangers.

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

I don't like speculating about things that someone else will write, because 1) I can't read minds, how would I know? and 2) school has taught me that guessing wrong means ridicule.

A comic series I still follow does "what will happen with [character] in the next issue?" "prompts" on social media, and I HATE it, because it feels to me just like the people who already know what will happen want to laugh behind their screens at people for guessing wrong.