The New Age of the Series – A Reader Rant
Am I crazy but does it feel like every romance novel published today is a part of a series? Almost every new book I pick up has a number after its title.
Is the standalone, single novel becoming extinct? I wonder if a book without a series will one day be a relic of the past similar to what happened to the landline telephone.
The death of the non-series novel might not feel like a big deal to everyone, but the series is starting to wreak havoc with my reading enjoyment. Am I whining? Probably. But I also think I have some valid grievances to address with authors and their publishers.
You (author and publisher) didn’t warn me there is a cliffhanger!
I did my due diligence. I read the book description and even downloaded a sample before buying it. There was no obvious hint that the story would not be resolved by page 289. Instead of an epilogue, I am given a teaser to the story to be continued in the book #X to be released in 18 months.
Please warn me what I getting into, so I can make the informed decision if I want to commit myself to this story. (Because, of course, I have to read the next book. I can’t handle a cliffhanger Can anyone?) I might choose to add this book to my wish list and wait until all the books in the series are published before starting to read. Give me the choice.
Side note: Are these “to be continued” books even technically a series? Shouldn’t they be labeled as serial novels, which means it is essentially a single work printed into sequential instalments?
You are sometimes forcing me to read all the books in the series and read them in order.
Sometimes I haven’t read the previous books but am ready to start book #5 when I realize I’ll never be happy without reading #1, #2, #3, and #4 beforehand. Ugh. Now I have to stop and go find, buy and read four books in order to thoroughly enjoy this one.
Full disclosure: I am a little OCD and hate to do things out of order, but I still blame the series for triggering my personal issues that I am sure are shared by other readers.
I am performing scholar-worthy research.
Even if I read the previous books in the series, I probably can’t even remember what happened in those books that I read months ago. You’ve continued an unsolved mystery and included all the same characters in every book, but I cannot recall who is who, how they are connected or where we left that mystery. Luckily, I read almost everything in an electronic format and can use the search feature, but it still takes time.
See why I am speaking out? World problems be damned. I am experiencing a reading crisis.
I understand why this is a trend and do not blame you. Why do most product trends begin and grow? Money and ego. More books might be sold when a series is created. The author also has the potential to create a book dynasty and that probably feels pretty awesome. I appreciate the lure of creating a successful series, and I accept the trend will probably not end. It appears to be our new normal. But I wonder if there are ways to make the series better for the readers without a loss of the number of books sold.
If your story will continue in the next book, let me know loud and clear in the book description, especially if you are going with a cliffhanger. Including the word ‘continues’ in the description is not enough. Give me a short sentence (bold and all caps are not discouraged) telling me.
Example: THIS STORY WILL NOT BE RESOLVED AT THE END OF THIS BOOK. YOU WILL NEED TO WAIT UNTIL THE NEXT BOOK IS PUBLISHED IN X MONTHS.
If you are promoting your series as standalone books, ask yourself if this is really true.
If you’ve introduced characters and significant portions of their backgrounds previously and/or are continuing the same plot device every book, I probably need to read those other books. This is fine if you warn me. Advise me to read those previous books or else I won’t enjoy the current as much as possible or even really understand it.
Give me everything I need in this book to remember what happened and who is who from the previous books.
Include a list of characters, book synopsis, family tree, footnotes, flow chart, anything that will allow me to easily catch up and reacquaint myself with what happened previously. Don’t make me work and spend precious reading time researching past books. I promise that including these will only make your current book better.
If you’re committed to a series, consider making them true standalone books.
You don’t have to intertwine the books so much to make a good series. Remember Mary Balogh’s Bedwyn Saga series where the central theme is a family? I think each book can be read without having to read the others. If I like a book, I’ll probably go read the others in the series. I will WANT to read them rather than feel like I HAVE to read them.
Be crazy and write a single standalone novel.
Pour your heart into one epic story. Take the time to fully develop your characters. Make me feel like I’m falling in love with your hero and I totally understand your heroine. Give me absolutely everything between the front cover and the back cover. This type of novel is more likely to end up on my Desert Isle Keeper list and I might even add you to my author auto-buy list.
Am I being unreasonable with these requests? What do you think, fellow readers? Let’s start a movement!
Next time let’s discuss the ridiculous invention of the novella. “I love spending $3.99 on a short story” – said no one. Ever.
~ Janet Boatman
The series conundrum has led to a VERY long TBR “pile” for me because I usually try to wait until the series is complete before I start it. I find it really frustrating to have to wait months and possibly years to find out how the story ends. I can’t begin to estimate how many series I have read multiple times because I really wanted to read a certain character’s installment in the series so badly I couldn’t wait that long. And because my TBR pile is so huge now, I frequently forget a series I really wanted to read and something reminds me or I check my computer files where I TRY to keep track of this list and heartbreakingly discover that I can no longer purchase book 3 because it’s been pulled. I try to follow all the author’s I’m interested in by newsletter or blog updates but I really have to decide if I’m going to read email all day or read a book. Thank goodness for ebooks otherwise there would only be small pathways in my house between all the floor to ceiling stacks of books. Amazon LOVES me because I buy so many books. They even replaced my broken Kindle for free once because I was such a “valuable customer.” Their words, not mine!
Don’t get me wrong, I really love a good series that I can sink into for days. But keeping track of it all is becoming burdensome. I’m a fast reader and can put away a book in record time but there is only so much time in a day and once in a while I need to sleep.
I feel your pain, Janet. I really do. I thought I might be the only person in the universe who had this problem. Nice to know I’m not.
Agreed. The last stand alone book of fiction I read was a Fantasy novel, and even in that genre it’s becoming a rarity. Sometimes I just don’t want to commit to reading 15 books about people from one village or in one family or who inherent some random piece of jewelry. I just wanna read a book and maybe I just want to read that book with no strings attached. I share your annoyance.
I agree with you wholeheartedly! I dislike series, and if they contain cliffhangers, I just hate them and don’t buy the next one, because it’s so obvious a trick that I feel cheated.
I’m happy that one of my favourite authors is SANDRA BROWN, whose books are usually standalones.
There has always been series. Lindsay’s Mallorys are nearly older than me! But the books were loosely related among them. Now it looks like it’s the same story going on and on and in the end I find it quite boring. Lack of imagination, I guess. And the money, of course. If you can tell a story in three books instead of just one well-edited book, more money for the publishing house with half the effort.
Telling the same story once and again, or in different parts artificially stretched (when a ‘natural’ way of telling the story would be a shorter form) it’s not just done in books.
The same happens with lots of TV series -that’s why I don’t currently follow anyone. And of course those silly movie remakes, really Ben-Hur and The Seven…? Again? Haven’t you got any imagination to create new stories or older archetypes in new forms?
I agree with Cady about Robyn Carr. The never ending, open ended, jillions of characters who got their own book, some of whom I didn’t give a fig about, really started to annoy me. Another one who did this was Rachel Lee with her Conard County books. I really loved most of them but then it just deteriorated for me and I completely lost interest.
I don’t mind a series and find I read a lot of them. What I hate are those open ended series, where every book is another new couple. I don’t mind open ended mystery series with one couple – there is always some conclusions, ie mystery solved, and if done well, a portion of the relationship moved forward. However, those romance series in the small towns where they have tons and tons of eligible people – or they all start moving back to town. just too much for me. For romance, I like to know an end point – three books, six books, whatever, but have something in mind when you start. Mary Balogh does this well. I hate to say it but I stopped reading Robyn Carr due to this neverending series.
I actually enjoy those kind of series, like Jill Shalvis’s Lucky Harbor one for example. To each his own!
I am reading the third book in a new contemporary series and, were it not for my Kindle’s search feature, I couldn’t keep track of all the characters, many of whom I think are placed in the book so that someday they too will have their own stories. It is pulling my attention away from the main characters. This is an open ended series and it does just bump along.
What bothers me most are the open-ended series. As someone who came to romance from sci-fi, I was totally comfortable with trilogies. The authors had a sense of pacing and trajectory, having mapped out the three books before launching into the story. Each book flows into the other, and I can trust that the end of the third will wrap things up. A great example of this being done well in romance fantasy is Sherry Thomas’s Elemental trilogy that starts with The Burning Sky.
That’s not the case at all in the endless series. Instead of rising to a climax and resolving, the stories endlessly bump along. The authors often seem not to know what do to next and contrive things to wring another book out. The villain escapes implausibly, or defeating him releases a new villain, or whoops, he wasn’t the big villain after all. You can’t get invested in the characters. The hero was the greatest of all time, except whoops, now we need another hero, so actually this hero is just as great as the other hero. Or the main characters have come to a relationship resolution near the end of the first book but whoops, we need tension, so let’s just throw something in there like a child that was never mentioned before, or a betrayal.
As a reader, I’m disoriented, and I don’t get that sweeping and overall sense of narrative. You get to the end, expecting satisfaction, and what you have is a big WOMP WOMP.
Rarely, I find authors writing an open-ended series which are compartmentalized well enough that I still go for it. These are usually ones where the worldbuilding is compelling (as Beverley mentioned upthread) and each book has its own unique and interesting story to tell within that world. Lois McMaster Bujold is the goddess of this. In genre romance, Linnea Sinclair does it spectacularly.
^^^^
Also, when a series spends half its time updating us on a cast of twenty past heroes and heroines, and how many babies they have, then I have a big problem with series books.
And as for serials… I’m reading (review copy) book one in a serial at the moment. The thing is, I don’t like it enough to pick up book two. This current trend for forcing readers to buy God only knows how many books in order to get an ending to their story is absurd. Sure, follow the same characters, but if each book doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end, we have a problem.
I actually read a book in a Harlequin series a while ago, where every book in the series had the same serial killer. So the killer wasn’t caught in any of the books! I thought that was a Harlequin failing their readers. You pick up a suspense book in category romance, and the author doesn’t deliver a complete read.
I can’t bring myself to read serials. Life is too short!
(r.e. comment higher up) I don’t see anything wrong with complaining that a book mid-series doesn’t work as a standalone. I think that if you can’t pick up any book and get a complete story, then that’s an author failing their readers.
It’s a bit like people who watch the Outlander TV show, get confused about the plot, and then have book-readers yelling at them: ‘Read the book!!!! It’s your own fault if you don’t get it!’. If one medium doesn’t work as a complete story on its own, then there’s a big problem there.
In Australia, if you walk into a bookshop, you pick up a book, enjoy the blurb, and buy it. They might only stock book seven, or book ten, and customers shouldn’t be forced to go and research the book on Goodreads (lots of readers don’t even know what Goodreads is!) in order to enjoy it.
Janet, I agree with everything you said! I hate cliffhanger endings; characters being thrown in who show up for no discernable reason other than to introduce them now so you’ll remember to buy their book later, and series that require you to have read the previous books in order to enjoy the one you bought. I do think that with her Psy/Changeling series, Nalini Singh did a decent job for most (though not all) of the series trying to give us some needed back story in each succeeding novel. I started with Kiss of Snow and while it was, yes, a little confusing, the basic story of Sienna and Hawke worked okay for me as a standalone.
I also find that novellas don’t generally work for me (never mind the price point). I just finished Hoyt’s Once Upon a Moonlit Night (decent) and James’ A Gentleman Never Tells (contrived and forgettable, IMHO) and they just reinforced my feelings on the subject.
This is a great discussion and actually something I’ve been thinking about recently A LOT. I even started keeping track of every book I read because I realized that I was losing track of series and, like others, I HATE reading things out of order. So now I mark the book I’m reading AND the series/# it is, so that I can remember to either check for the next book, or at least know that I have missed out. Scattered thoughts:
1. Series used to feel like a treat. The first romance series I ever read were written by Nora Roberts. She was, and maybe still is, the queen of writing about an entire family through an interconnected series. The novels never felt forced or like they were written just because there was a contract for X number of books.
2. I do love a good series because sometimes it’s nice to share a journey with characters — sometimes the love story has built up over a few books and the anticipation for getting THEIR story is so much fun. (Alas, also a letdown on many occasions). However, sometimes it makes me like the characters less… like maybe I don’t want to know everything they did after their HEA?! Sometimes it just feels like the old characters are mentioned to let us know that they dutifully procreated.
3. Series fail when it feels like a character is “forced” to have a story by virtue of it being a series.
4. For readers like me, who feel a compulsion of sorts to read every book in a series in order, this results in a) reading lots of books you don’t want to read, but feel like you HAVE to and/or b) reading books and then forgetting whatever happened by the time the next one comes out! (That means either re-reading or treating the new release like a standalone…agh)
“Sometimes it just feels like the old characters are mentioned to let us know that they dutifully procreated.”
Ugh, this is such an unfortunate trend in series writing, and I really dislike it now.
Have you tried Calibre? It’s a book organizing system that automatically tells you series.
I’ve heard of Calibre but haven’t tried it. Thanks for the tip, Dabney!
On the one hand I enjoy series, because if I like it I want to keep coming back to it. I do read a ridiculous amount of series, but I’m often happiest if it’s the changing couples sort of series (like Nalini Singh or Ilona Andrews Edge series), or the loosely connected stand alones like Hannah Howell. And I especially like trilogies, which is privacy early training from Mercedes Lackey. But if there are cliffhangers or its more serialized novel, I’m unlikely to appreciate it.
I wish there was some way on Goodreads to see what percentage of your books are stand-alones vs series, but I suspect around 90% of mine are series by now.
I love this post too. I am so over series. I love AAR and have enjoyed all their reviews over the years. However, now when I click on a review, the first thing I look at is the top section where it so often says “part of a series”. If it does, I immediately close the review and don’t even bother reading it.
Janet – I could tell you weren’t a hater (I sound like my kids!) – just a frustrated reader. In my long-winded (and typo riddled) response, I hope my tone was light.
People read different kinds of books because we all have differing tastes – I look at the standalone vs. series conversation similarly to one about genre preferences. I’m not eager to read contemporary romances about motorcycle clubs – but if a book or author is well reviewed, I’ll give the book a try. If I have any hard & fast rules about reviewing books its this – keep an open mind! But back to that fictional MC romance – whether its a standalone or series, for me its always worth a bit of digging to determine my best starting point so that I can most enjoy a book. Knowing that I’ll have a higher likelihood of enjoying a 3rd book if I know what happened in books 1 & 2, I’ll make the effort to determine where best to start. I don’t mind doing the homework (I actually like it!) – but I can appreciate that others might not.
Oh and that fictional MC book? Not so fictional. Molly O’Keefe (M. O’Keefe) was fairly new to me when I reviewed her historical novella in the Gambled Away anthology. I loved it. But I was leery about reading her newest Burn Down the Night because it was pretty much the opposite: a dark, erotic contemporary novel with a major MC plot. I decided to give it a try anyway – but (of course!) duh!) I read the first two books in the series before I downloaded it. I loved the first, liked/loved the second & wasn’t super crazy about Burn Down the Night after all. But. If I hadn’t read the first 2, I might not have finished the 3rd – it really wasn’t for me. My personal takeaway? The books as a series were super entertaining – but as standalone’s? Not nearly as appealing.
Anyway – I loved your blog post & was so happy to read it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with AAR – I hope this post won’t be a standalone. HA!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fist pump.
Vickie – as reviewers we pick up books in series where we may not have read the others as a matter of course. It goes with the territory. If we didn’t do that, AAR would be publishing fewer reviews than we do. And some reviewers look to read authors they haven’t read before, for instance, so waiting for #1 in a series to come along isn’t always an option. AAR also has a policy of trying to have different reviewers review books by any one particular author so there are a variety of opinions available to our readers. That invariably means that reviewers might not have read other books in a current series. Most of us read and review quite prolifically and might not have time to catch up on a previous book or books. And most importantly we are trying to provide a service for our readers and to make them aware of things we think are important and that they might like to know. Therefore, saying “this book doesn’t work as a standalone” is a legitimate and informative comment for anyone who has heard about a book and is interested in reading it and who might be frustrated on discovering it isn’t what they thought.
Yes, I know this information is probably available on places like Goodreads, which I use frequently, but not everybody does, and if we don’t include details like that, were not doing our jobs properly.
Finally and for the record, I am happy to be able to report that I have never come across anyone here at AAR that I would describe as “silly” (read really stupid).
I don’t mind when there is a complete story in every book, or when I’m satisfied enough to not have to immediately read the next book. I have a solid HFN and questions have been answered. What I really hate is cliffhangers (especially when they’re not advertised) or when it feels as if the book has been written as “part one”. So there is stuff missing. I always feel a bit duped at that point, unless I was expecting the book to be part of an EPIC story line.
Because I rarely read series books one after the other, I’ll often not get to a sequel for months or years. If I forget, then I guess I wasn’t invested…
I find in LGBTQ+ romances there are usually three types of series –
The first is a type of chain series where the characters have their romance in the first book, then a secondary character has their story told in the second etc….These tend to be pure Romance with HEA at the end of each book.
The second is where the world building is so strong and involved that there is an overarching plot throughout the whole series. These are often post-apocalyptic or fantasy and the most likely to have cliff-hangers.
The third are series where the first book introduces the romance of two very strong protagonists and a growing supporting cast. Each ‘episode’ after tends to be the adventures of these characters and are often standalone, but with certain jokes or references which can only be understood by reading the series. They can often be the ones that catch the reader out with cliff hangers. These tend to be militaristic or detective / crime stories.
I have loved reading examples from all three of these types but have also been caught out – a book I am supposed to be reviewing currently is a case in point. I could not make head or tail of it and it’s by an author I have read before. Then I discovered it was #2 in a series and definitely not a stand-alone!!
I love this post! I am fond of series (not serials) in general, the whole idea of the brother/best friend what have you getting a happy ending makes me happy too. I definitely suffer from the ‘I have no recollection of what happened in book 1, 2, 3’ syndrome as well, since I read so much. While I have several friends who are series OCD and must read in order, I am not personally so picky (unless there is a serious plot revelation from the whole story arc that has to be read in order). I already know that couple X and couple Y are going to get together in the first 2 books because the blurbs told me that so it doesn’t bother me if in book 3 they have a baby. I usually read series out of order, mostly because I only find out about it in the middle. I hate cliffhanger stories – I will rarely pick them up unless they are by a trusted author, and I definitely want to be warned ahead of time. I can’t remember the last time I read a single standalone book – maybe a Harlequin? Thanks for these thoughts!
I’m with you, Janet! I prefer to choose standalone books or parts of series that can be read as standalones. I seldom follow whole series.
I totally understand what you are saying, but like someone up comment, I pretty well disagree with most of what you said. I think authors find it hard in this day and age with so many books out there to come up with something new each time, and so if they’ve got a world or family built for a book, it makes it easier for them to write more without having to come up with a completely new idea. Also from my point of view if I find a world I love, I want more! I want books for some secondary characters. So a series is great.
My book world is on Goodreads and I’ve built up many friends and people I follow who like similar things so I not only have a good place to find new books, but I can read their reviews to find out whether it has a cliffie or part of a series and can ask them if I need to read previous books or I can read a particular on in the middle of a series as a standalone. I quite often do that. If it’s a cliffie then I put them in my folders for later when they’re all out. I research my books before I read them, it makes for a better reading experience.
I see you say the writer should recap in the following books so that people don’t have to read the prior books, and I agree they should, but a LOT of people complain in their reviews about recapping and I don’t feel an author should have to do that. Sometimes if a book doesn’t come out for a year, then it’s fun to go back and reread the previous one.
Nothing gets my goat more than reviewers complaining and marking books down just because they’ve been too silly (read really stupid) to pick up a book in the middle of a series and then complain they don’t know what’s going on. Even if you don’t like Goodreads, it could be used only to find out whether a book is a standalone or part of a series and if it’s part of a series either pick up the previous ones and read in order (hence numbered!) or don’t complain if you don’t know what’s happening. This is a major gripe for me. The author shouldn’t be penalised because someone picks up a book in the middle of a series and doesn’t read the previous ones when they’re quite clearly numbered. It’s not like it used to be in the old days when it might have been hard to find out if a book is part of a series, it’s so easy these days.
Anyway, there’s my vent at the end.
I love reading everyone’s comments! I had a lot of fun writing this. I should clarify that I am not a series-hater. It feels like many series are poorly executed lately, perhaps because everyone feels like they have to create a series. I am not sure!? I do really think a little flowchart catch up tool at the front of the book could solve a lot. These are some of my series favorites: Lisa Kleypas’ The Wallflowers & The Hathaways, Anne Mallory’s Secrets, Sarah MacLean’s Rules of Scoundrels, Loretta Chase’s The Dressmakers, Elizabeth Hoyt’s Maiden Lane, Stephanie Laurens’ Bastion Club, Jillian Hunter’s Boscastle Affairs, Tessa Dare’s Spindlecove & Stud Club, and more!
Yes, I understood clearly that you were not condemning series but instead were making an argument against a marketplace that has saturated us with series at the expense of stand-alones. I don’t think there is a good argument for ending stand-alones as a fictional form, which is where it seems we’re headed. The marketplace is unbalanced right now.
I love many series in romance writing and enjoy the premise of a series. Having said that, I do miss the occasional stand-alone and wish that in the rush to conform to consumer popularity, the stand-alone is no longer marketable. I find it very difficult to find stand-alone books in historical romances, which is what I tend to read most. I gave up on Lisa Kleypas’s _Marry Winterbourne_, for instance, because it begins well after the romance is established, which apparently took place in the first book in the series. But because I gave up on the first book mid-way, I missed the set up to the second book. The Ravenell series is advertised as a series instead of a serial. I find that I rely now on reviewers to alert readers if they need to read the previous book(s) first.
Overall, I find it very reasonable to suggest that it would be nice to have some stand-alones as an option. The stand-alone can be a wonderful literary form in genre writing.
I do also, by the way, like novellas very much and in all genre and non-genre writing. Some romance authors like Courtney Milan, Cecilia Grant and Mary Balogh are very skilled at novella writing. Novellas like _The Governess Affair_, _A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong, and _A Matter of Class_ are among my very favorite books to read. I think the price of them though can be a bit steep.
Like Emily, I like to read in order where possible, although it’s not uncommon, as a reviewer, to pick up a book for review where I haven’t read other books in the series – that’s just how it goes. But I do agree about what seems to be a growth in the SERIAL novel – the ones where there is a continuing story running through the books which means you HAVE to read all of them if you want to find out what happens in the end. I don’t mean series where there is one overarching thread – Caroline Linden’s The Truth About the Duke series comes to mind – the three books tell three different stories and the romances in the first two are resolved even though the common plot thread isn’t resolved until the last book. That’s not too much of a problem. I’m talking about the books that end on cliffhangers, or in which the story is clearly To be Continued. Again, that’s all well and good, provided I KNOW IN ADVANCE that’s what I’m getting into.
I don’t mind series, although I do sometimes wish for a good old standalone. It’s the books that are serials but not advertised as such that annoy me.
Oh Janet!
I feel you. I hear you. But I disagree with you (mostly).
I LOVE almost everything about series romances. Couple of things upfront – I only became a devoted fan of the romance genre over the last three years. After I finished the reading the Outlander series, I looked for another book to capture all the feelings it inspired. I found myself hooked on historical romances (those Dukes can drive a girl to distraction!). Then, only after I accidentally read a few well reviewed books by Sherry Thomas and Lorraine Heath, did I realize those books were actually part of a series of books by those authors. All those characters I loved so much appeared both before and after the books I finished. OMG.
That feeling – the OMG – in a nutshell, is why I love the series. I love the glimpses of characters I hope to see in future books. I love trying to guess who gets a story next. I love meeting up with couples who fell in love in earlier books. I love villains getting their comeuppance after escaping by the skin of their teeth in previous stories. I LOVE SERIES ROMANCE.
I won’t lie to you though. I HATE to find out I read the books out of sequence! For me, if books are in a series – I have to read them in order – even if the book I am reviewing/most interesting in much further along in the sequence. It’s an expensive habit (unless I can get them through my library), but that’s just the way it is. I hate knowing things about events/characters in advance of their stories. If it happens (rarely), I immediately go back and start all over again at the beginning. After a few mistakes early on, I never read a series out of sequence – and usually only by mistake.
Unfortunately, I had just this experience over the past week – I finished the latest in Katharine Ashe’s Falcon Club series, The Earl, (oh my gosh – maybe my most favorite books in a series ever) and then her newest novella, The Scoundrel & I. The novella is a spin-off on the Falcon Club books – but is also linked to her Rogues of the Sea series. Which FOR SOME CRAZY REASON I failed to read before now (they’re great by the way). And in reading them, I discovered many characters who earn their own books in the Falcon Club series. Still with me? So – much like you, I am annoyed that I read Rogues after the Falcons. My OCD is pinging like crazy. In this case, I’m not sure who to blame. Sure, I’d love to read an authors work from oldest to newest. In this case, Ms. Ashe was a new to me author when I started the Falcon series and since they are so terrific, I raced through them. It never occurred to me that the entire series was a spin-off from another! I’m not sure I did my due diligence when I started the Falcon Club series – because I probably would have caught it – but I’m not sure. I’ve looked at her site & I don’t think the link between them is obvious enough.
But moving on. Though I LOVE SERIES (in historical romance particularly) I like your warnings too! I think they are a great idea! Oh – and can we talk to Joanna Bourne about the Spymasters series? I still can’t decide if I read them in the right order & her website only further muddled my little brain. I could still use a bit more help from her – although that seems to be confusing me more than helping me in this case. I think most of those trees/synopsis’s/flow charts are available on author sites – if you’re willing to spend the time digging for them – but I again, I wish it all wasn’t so difficulty to sort out sometimes. Grace Burrowes & Anne Stuart do a good job making family/friendship lines clear – I wish more authors would follow their leads.
And yes, next time let’s definitely discuss the $3.99 novella. Yowsers.
I could not agree more!! I think series have ruined so many good characters who started out strong but by the end became shells of their former selves and almost unrecognizable!