Ralif Redhammer
Legend
Money absolutely has much to do with this. Heck, it goes back to even the Penny Dreadfuls. The publishers are probably putting no small amount of pressure on the writers to write these sprawling series. Which probably just makes things even worse as they choke on writing that next volume.
But these 6-10 book series of 600+ page books invariably suffer for it, I think. Even the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, which is a favorite of mine, and actually finished, saw some of its quality slipping as it shuddered under its own weight and fast turnaround in the twelve years it took to finish.
Anyway, I finished re-reading Myth Directions. It's been fun revisiting these childhood favorites. One thing I didn't realize back when I first read it, was the whole Jahk = Jock joke. But in my defense, I was nine or ten at the time!
I started reading Seth Skorkowsky's Mountain of Daggers short story collection. He has some great gaming advice videos on YouTube (though my favorite is probably the Scott Brown Incident), but this one is starting to lose me after reading three "ample bosoms" in about five pages.
But these 6-10 book series of 600+ page books invariably suffer for it, I think. Even the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, which is a favorite of mine, and actually finished, saw some of its quality slipping as it shuddered under its own weight and fast turnaround in the twelve years it took to finish.
Anyway, I finished re-reading Myth Directions. It's been fun revisiting these childhood favorites. One thing I didn't realize back when I first read it, was the whole Jahk = Jock joke. But in my defense, I was nine or ten at the time!
I started reading Seth Skorkowsky's Mountain of Daggers short story collection. He has some great gaming advice videos on YouTube (though my favorite is probably the Scott Brown Incident), but this one is starting to lose me after reading three "ample bosoms" in about five pages.
Charles Stross has an explaination for series on his blog. Money. If the two first novels of a series reach a certain amount of sale, the series can go on indefinately as there will be people who buy any book that comes out in the series. Stand alone novels are thus less profitable. Stross basically says he canned three series (Eschaton, Freyaverse, halthing state) after the first two novels of the series didn't reach critical sales.