Has publishing destroyed entire genres by pumping out series and forcing authors to spread out a story across trilogies or a dozen novels? Or are standalones too insular? Do you prefer series or standalones?
Standalones are superior, yes.
Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Dumas, Tolstoy.They all released novels in serialised form. When you read Pickwick Papers, you are basically reading an onnibus.
As a kid I preferred series; as an adult I defo prefer standalones. I've consistently found that books written by authors who have the ability to be interesting without being too prolix are always the most profound and the most satisfying. I couldn't imagine some of my favourite titles being stretched out into fucking trilogies or whatever.>>25207858You'd might as well call a standalone book with chapters a series, then.
>>25207871>You'd might as well call a standalone book with chapters a series, then.Not really, Dickens literally read fan mail and adapted the story based on feedback
>>25207914How is any of that relevant to whether it’s standalone or a series?
>>25207919I explained how a serialised novel differs from regular chapters.
>>25207496I only read stand-alones. Even if I start reading a series, if I liked it, I'm too scared to read the next one- the chance that the author will fuck it up is too high.
>>25207496Series are mostly flops. What famous series even are there? I can't think of any other than Gargantua and Pantagruel, and maybe the La Comédie humaine by Honor the Ballsack. Border trilogy? Way less popular than Blood Meridian. Remembrance of Things Past is technically a single novel in 7 volumes.There's Don Quixote, but I'd hesitate to call a duology a 'series'.
>>25207963A series =/= a serialThe Brothers Karamazov is a standalone, despite being a serial. But the Three Musketeers was a serial that was part of a series of novels.
>>25208102TBK was the first book of an unfinished duology. Dosto planned for Alyosha to assassinate the tzar in the sequel.
>>25208108And yet it is a standalone because the sequel was never written. You can go ahead and pretend the ending is open-ended, but it works as a singular, closed story. Same can’t be said for a real cliffhanger like Gardens of the Moon by Erikson.
>>25208102I understand that it's not the same, but you need to consider that there are similarities and the author can change the original plot he had in mind in between installments.Let's also not forget how much easier it is to write a book now, before you had to use a quill or fountain pen. Nowadays you use a computer, and can easily research anything online. So you can transpose your ideas to a book much faster.
