Endings
I just finished Ithria Book 15. It ended as I feared: Cliff-hanger. Sort-of. There’s enough said that there is no doubt whatsoever about what will happen (the bad guys are going to get their ass severely kicked), but the actual happening will be in book 16.
This is more a case of “the last chapter of the book is also the first chapter of the next book.” I don’t mind that pattern, in most cases. By book 15, my patience runs thin. It reminds of the TV-series trope of “action scene before the commercial, commercial, then the show resumes – 3 days earlier”. That’s fine for season 1 or the first couple of episodes of any season, but in season 4, episode 6, I’m going to watch it! You don’t need to open with a bang then screw with time. Just tell the story. The suspenseful, near cliff-hanger ending is much the same way. It’s book 15! It’s not as if I’m going to read/not-read book 16 based on how much I’m wondering about what happens immediately next. You’ve got me, at this point.
On the other hand, another not-uncommon way to end a book – much more common in LitRPG, which is series crazy, than other genres – is to just stop. This often runs hand-in-hand with the continuous chapter numbers. The book ends, but the story just stops. The author hit a word count or a chapter count and declared the book complete. That’s too far in the other direction, especially for the first few books.
Primal Hunter strikes a good balance. Most of the books conclude in some way or another. Only a couple of them stop. One story arc is two and a half books (or was it three and half?) long so that one (those) just stop. The rest wrap something up.
Wine of the Gods is sort-of its own category. It’s a 56 book series (according to Amazon; throw in everything related and it’s probably over 80). They all conclude. Some are sub-series. Some change point-of-view (drastically; from the good-guys to the bad-guys).
I usually don’t make it past book 10(ish). The three links here are exceptions, not the rule. I gave up on He Who Fights with Monsters, The Legend of Randidly Ghosthound, System Universe, and many others.
The biggest problem in a never-ending series with the same protagonist is the complexity that builds up. That’s why I gave up on Wheel of Time, too: When book X comes out, I need to re-read book X-1 to figure out what’s going on. When the books are long and the release schedule is slow, this can recurse and I re-read the series when each new book comes out. That’s annoying. It’s also realistic. Stories don’t end (sometimes not even when the protagonist dies; “legacy” is a thing). As time passes, more and more people become part of it. Eventually, which will vary by person, the cognitive load of keeping track of everything outweighs the story’s entertainment value. 1632 suffers from this, too. I didn’t “give up” on the series, but I did skip some books (and I’ve re-read some of them many times).
My plan (I’m writing chapter 5, not book 5) is to have a goal for each book and end it when the goal is achieved. This leaves plot threads dangling, but it doesn’t cliff-hang anything. Since the books’ numbering system is base-12, book 12 seems an obvious series limit. I’ll be thrilled to finish book 1, but one can dream.
I don’t want to deal with the ever-increasing complexity, even (especially?) as the author. I also risk the reader’s transition from “gay werewolves is a novel idea; I wonder if he pulls it off” to “enough with teh ghay already”.
The goal of book one is get a group together to survive the winter. It’s going to end with the first snowfall of the season, which totally coincidentally happens just as the group starts to cohere. Book two is what happens while they’re isolated over the winter. Book three is the rest of the world mattering again. That’s as far as my projection goes because I haven’t decided how the world intruding is going to work out. They could be crushed by the US Army and that’s the end of that. Trilogy for the win!
Marked Up 