I am politely declining long, multi-book series
Just recently I have come across so many authors who decide to make more money from 21 books of 50,000 words rather than 7 books of 150,000 words. And it really annoys me. It feels like a way to ‘milk’ the reader. Yes, you get a loss leader, with the first book probably permafree, but then the reader is faced with 20 further books that the author expects you to buy. And I really, really don’t want cliffhangers in the next 19 novels to tempt me into buying the next in series.
I don’t mind up to seven books in one series. (I have to say that because my own longest series, the Ammonite Galaxy was that. It took me eight years to write and each book was a reasonable length, I think. I hope.).
I often look at the free kindle bestseller lists, here:
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store/zgbs/digital-text
to find new and interesting authors I haven’t heard of before. I have found some great ones (and lots of not so great ones, too, but hey, they are free. It’s easy just to stop reading, right?).
So now, apart from filtering by number of stars, I am careful always to look and see how many books there are in the series. Up to seven? Fine, I’ll give it a go. Over seven? Not a chance. After all, it only took Harry Potter seven books for all his adventures. Who needs more?
So I will vacuum up your standalones, your duologies, your trilogies, your tetralogies, your pentalogies, your hexologies, your heptalogies. But not your nonodecologies or your icosologies. Enough is enough!
I make exceptions for Janet Evanovich and Michael Connelly, though reluctantly. I still think they could have tied it all up in seven books.
For the rest of the world …
…the finger paused, didn’t click, and moved on.