That's obvious: because they are, as they say in the publishing marketplace of today, Brand Names!

According to current publishing wisdom, a recognizable series – or a celebrity book – is a ‘brand name' that readers will pick up because they recognize the name and will therefore know what to expect. Too many choices leads to paralysis. People fear trying something new for fear it will disappoint and they'll have wasted their money. We live in a culture driven by consumption, which changes the way we approach our entertainment: Entertainment is product, not literature, another way to make people spend money and keep the economy turning over and over.

An extreme example of this might be the four Stars Wars: The Phantom Menace novelization covers, each with a different face on the front! However, the buyer got the same book inside those covers. The marketing folks evidently hoped to appeal to collectors, and to thereby sell what is essentially the same product twice (or four times) over.

Dealing with entertainment as product, as name brand recognition, also changes what companies are willing to take a chance on.

We see the same disease in movies. How many remakes of old tv series have appeared on the big screen in recent years? Such remakes, I've read, so do all that well at the box office but they're made because they have a built-in base audience and recognition factor that original movies don't possess. Sequels are endemic. However, in movies and tv offer greater press attention (the market for movies and tv shows is much larger than that for novels), so the potential viewer has more access to reviews and word of mouth to make up their mind, whereas book readership, being much lower and more focused on bestsellerdom (because of the smaller profit margin in publishing) means mid-list books get thrown out with little publicity. Therefore, it's seen as more of a risk for the buyer when it comes time to shell out $7 or even $24 for someone new and untried.

Publishing companies also want a book with that crucial built-in readership, so they look for media tie ins, or for a series.

If a reader brings a history to the newest volume in a series, then the investment is already there. The downside is that it is harder to bring in new readers to a third or fourth volume.

After all, how many of you are going to pick up the new Robert Jordan novel if you haven't read the series from the beginning? Yet, the title and cover art and hoopla created by the release of the eighth volume might cause a new reader to go back and start at the first one, thinking it might be worthwhile to see what all the fuss is about.

That's not to say that a writer known for writing standalone novels, such as Neal Stephenson, can't have success in part because each work stands alone. The question is whether such works are becoming more rare. I know of no statistical study done on this matter.

But do series only sell because they're brand names? Because they are the only "product" that's available on the shelves?

I certainly hear people say 1) "I hate series." 2) "I won't read a series until all the volumes are out." And 3) [this is my favorite, in which the speaker imputes motive.] "Writers write series only because they're greedy and ripping off the consumer"; "they're too lazy to do the work to create something new with each book"; "they're just re-using old stuff over and over". Admittedly, this last complaint is not without foundation – although it can be argued that some writers aren't re-using the same old stuff over and over deliberately, but because that's all they have to write about – which is the theme of a different essay.

In contrast, I've spoken to readers who love series. They are more than happy to spend lots of time with familiar characters in a familiar landscape, who enjoy returning to that place time after time. This is, I suppose, kind of like going back to your home town to visit, which I could either qualify as fantasy or as horror depending on where you grew up.

It's here that the multivolume novel, the fat fantasy series, begins to gain length. This, for me, is the beginning point.

The work a writer invests in a universe makes that universe come to have more depth and familiarity, more ‘reality' if you will. The more depth a universe has, the more there is there to explore in it. In the same way, there are theoretically an almost infinite number of historical novels that could be written about the shared universe that is human history and prehistory on Earth. As a universe gains depth, actions and reactions acted out on its stage also gain more resonance and emotional impact, so readers are more likely to come back to that place again and again.

That's the first serious challenge of writing a fat fantasy series.

How do you create depth and resonance?

By using landscape and character.

Continued...

Text Copyright © 2002 Kate Elliott