if only because it was a lot riskier for a publisher to take a chance on the first book of an open-ended series that might or might not do well if it couldn't be marketed at least somewhat independently.
Right -- these days there's definitely a strong push to sell a stand-alone book "with series potential." If you try to do something that's metaplot out of the gate, there's a much bigger risk of leaving your readers hanging if the publisher says, on second thought, nah. I don't know if that was equally true, say, thirty years ago.
About the closest I can think of are some shortish series (trilogies/quadrologies) that function as a fairly tightly plotted unit, basically a single book that's 400K long - like Julian May's Pleistocene Exile, say, where the first book (IIRC) very much does not feel like a book that is complete in itself, but the series doesn't wander on for 20 books either.
That's my suspicion, too -- that if I dredged my brain not for the famously long series, but for trilogies and the like, I'd find some examples where it's more clearly a continuous story (without being a clusterfuck of bad pacing and structure). But trilogies in particular have been stamped so very strongly with what I think of as sonata structure -- which I could have sworn I wrote an essay about already, but my website shows no evidence of such a thing having ever existed -- basically a stand-alone movement in a major key, a complication in a minor key that ends without resolution, and then the recapitulation of the theme, now Bigger! and Better! and in a major key once more -- so you're going to get a lot of the "well done; medals for everybody" endings in the first book.
I think this model does exist in manga, but doesn't really seem to have caught on in Western publishing. And even there, the first few installments are usually at least somewhat standalone until it becomes evident that the series has legs.
Now I'm thinking of Chinese webnovels -- except that my impression of those is that they tend to be published a chapter at a time, without the additional layer of structure imposed by separate volumes. (I could be wrong, though; what I know about those comes secondhand.)
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yati
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Date: 2021-03-12 10:27 am (UTC)Right -- these days there's definitely a strong push to sell a stand-alone book "with series potential." If you try to do something that's metaplot out of the gate, there's a much bigger risk of leaving your readers hanging if the publisher says, on second thought, nah. I don't know if that was equally true, say, thirty years ago.
About the closest I can think of are some shortish series (trilogies/quadrologies) that function as a fairly tightly plotted unit, basically a single book that's 400K long - like Julian May's Pleistocene Exile, say, where the first book (IIRC) very much does not feel like a book that is complete in itself, but the series doesn't wander on for 20 books either.
That's my suspicion, too -- that if I dredged my brain not for the famously long series, but for trilogies and the like, I'd find some examples where it's more clearly a continuous story (without being a clusterfuck of bad pacing and structure). But trilogies in particular have been stamped so very strongly with what I think of as sonata structure -- which I could have sworn I wrote an essay about already, but my website shows no evidence of such a thing having ever existed -- basically a stand-alone movement in a major key, a complication in a minor key that ends without resolution, and then the recapitulation of the theme, now Bigger! and Better! and in a major key once more -- so you're going to get a lot of the "well done; medals for everybody" endings in the first book.
I think this model does exist in manga, but doesn't really seem to have caught on in Western publishing. And even there, the first few installments are usually at least somewhat standalone until it becomes evident that the series has legs.
Now I'm thinking of Chinese webnovels -- except that my impression of those is that they tend to be published a chapter at a time, without the additional layer of structure imposed by separate volumes. (I could be wrong, though; what I know about those comes secondhand.)