In what will come as a complete surprise to almost no one, I read a book this weekend. Because I spent all of Friday passing another kidney stone and the first part of Saturday recovering, I had settled on a light, chick-lit sort of read. Unfortunately for me it was also part of my “get over my prejudice against Christian Fiction” reading plan.
It backfired.
One of my oft-repeated complaints about Christian fiction is that the books are always carved up into pieces which become marketed as “series”. The world of most genres right now is plagued by the marketing device of series fiction and there’s almost no escaping it.
(I actually wrote a version of this same blog post a few months back. I’m repeating myself largely out of frustration, but also because I don’t hear many other people saying it and as a book consumer AND producer I think it has to be said.)
There is a difference between writing a series and chopping up a single story.
True series are like starfish and earthworms. When you carve up the main story, each book grows into a complete body. The best example I can give you is the series I know the best–Harry Potter. (And you KNEW I was going to say that.) Each Harry Potter book is a stand-alone story. This means characters are introduced and developed fully, plotlines are begun and brought to conclusion. The “series” comes into play with the overarching story of Voldemort Vs. The World and the Bildungsroman of Harry Potter himself. Those elements are intriguing and keep the reader coming back to subsequent books. But if you pick up, say, Chamber of Secrets, you could read that book and only that book. All the main questions–Is there a Chamber of Secrets? If so, who opened it? Who is petrifying the students? Why is Harry hearing voices no one else can hear? What is written in the diary? What is to be done about Professor Lockwood?–are answered completely.
The book I read on Friday did no such thing. It’s about four girls living together and remodeling an old house. I started to get concerned when I looked at my Kindle Indicator and saw that I was at 68% and we were still introducing story elements and character dilemmas. Generally the introductions don’t take more than 40% of the story–and that’s being generous. So when the book just stopped after a birthday party I was befuddled. Do any of the girls end up dating the men who have crushes on them? What happens with the one girl’s dreadful boss? Does the Christian girl convert any of the other girls?* Does the mean girl’s bulimia get treated? A bit of research on Amazon and Wikipedia reveals that if I DO want the answers to those questions I will have to buy THREE MORE BOOKS at $10 apiece. When I read the synopses of the other three books it became painfully clear that this was actually ONE book, carved and padded to look like four. The Christian publisher (in this case David C. Cook) is asking me to pay $32.99 for a basic chick lit novel that would have sold for $12.95 through Red Dress Ink.
These books are tree stumps. You’ve got the basic bit of wood upon which you can sit for awhile, but there’s nothing to climb.
I know a lot of writers and I implore you–if you want to write a series, fantastic. Just please write a starfish and don’t let your agent talk you into turning your story into a bunch of stumps.
*I really despise conversion as a plotline because it implies that become a Christian is just getting converted. It’s the same reason I dislike weddings as a whole plotline. Both events–a wedding and a conversion–are the beginning, not the culmination. In addition, a lot of stories which use conversion as a plotline imply that the main character is heroic for converting the other people. It’s sort of like saying the mailman is a hero for bringing you a check for $1,000,000 and totally ignoring the fellow who actually paid the money out of his account.
One word: Amen!
I abhor series that start with an “introductory” book. It drives me mad to read two or three hundred pages, and what? Now I know who everyone is and if I want to find out what actually happens in the “story” I will have to trudge through a stack of books. Total pet peeve of mine! And sadly for me it has been Christian authors (can you say Ted Dekker?) who have pulled this trick more often than secular authors
.
And the reason one uses Harry Potter as an example is that it is the perfect example of the right way to do it
. I used HP as my model when it comes to this idea for my books (although I won’t have seven!).
The only author I’ve read whom I can forgive for not having a true resolution at the end of each book of his series is Patrick Rothfuss. When I read The Name of the Wind, I got to the end and felt no resolution–I knew, even after 800+ pages we’d only just begun–but I was fine with that. His writing sucked me in so hard I hit the end of the book and thought, “No! It’s too short! Keep going!”
BTW, I love how you use an earthworm as an analogy. Perfect. I shall have to steal that
.
Here’s where I’m embarrassed. Because I LOVE the Rothfuss books so much (Read them three times each and readying for a fourth go-round) that it didn’t even occur to me to include them.
I guess with both Rothfuss and George RR Martin (and there’s plenty of room for complaint with Martin especially) the books are meaty enough that I don’t feel cheated. It’s hard to look at 1200 pages of story–episodically broken out into hundreds of smaller stories that do pay off–as being a dodge for coin.
The Rothfuss books are phenomenal aren’t they? The kind of writing that makes me want to just throw in the towel because I feel like I can never be that good so why even try
. Sigh…
Exactly. It’s just like…”oh well. The Platonic Ideal of Book has happened. Anything I do will be a mere folly.”
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
How much of this problem do you think is a way of coping with depressed pricing courtesy of e-readers? I mean, do you think that publishers who 5 years ago would have put the 4-part series out as a single novel for, oh, I dunno, maybe $25 list now figure that they can’t keep going if they sell most copies at $10, and are using the series as a strategy to keep income steady? Or would they have tried to milk more out of the purchasers by turning a single novel into a series even before e-books were an issue?
This problem has existed in the Christian marketplace LONG before e-readers were popular. In fact, the “series” I’m talking about was printed about 10 years ago, I think.
In the Christian fiction market it’s been a keystone business model for at least 16-17 years. (That was the first time that I naively picked up a book for $10 and read it only to discover that if I wanted the end of the story it’d cost another $25 for 2 more books. )
I cannot speak to other markets’ length of use with the strategy. As we discussed last time I made this same complaint–I hate reruns, but it’s a dodgy day here–I think it’s becoming more of a thing in the mainstream than it used to be. But even in the six or 8 months since I wrote that I’ve seen a lot of pushback. Mainstream series aren’t doing as well as they had been last summer. I think too many people are fed up with the idea of a story’s not being concluded.