For some reason SF book publishers are hiding the fact that books are part of series. Even on the inside cover it is becoming harder and harder to determine if a book is in a series or where it falls in the series. I don’t understand it. I don’t see how this is a good business strategy. If a book looks interesting I want to get the series and begin from the beginning. I don’t want to have to do detective work. In fact if I can’t figure it out, the book is going back on the shelf. I bought two books last week that were out of order. I would have bought them anyway but I went home without anything to read. Pisses me off.
Oh, a note to passing mods. I despite the fact that I am mildly pissed off I don’t want this to be a pitting. I am more interested in other’s opinions and if anyone else has noticed the trend.
That I can handle. I kind of expect there to be sequels. It’s when there are a few books in the series and it’s almost impossible to tell what the other books are. They even hide it on the inside of the book under the also bys. Take John Ringo for instance Nothing indicating that certain books should be read before others. Even the Dresden Files books are doing it now. They used to be labeled “Book One of the Dresden Files.” Now they are coming out and the cover says “A Novel of the Dresden Files.” And these are not stand alone books, you kind of need to know what happens before. At least they are in order inside of the book.
This is probably due to the tendency of the big chain bookstores not to stock books for very long and to reorder haphazardly. If you see books 2, 4, and 6 of the ZZllangian series you’ll hold off buying them. But if you see three books each labeled “a novel of the ZZllangians” you might buy them, and then search out the rest in one way or another.
Of course, back in the Good Old Days, writers wrote individual books that weren’t part of infinite series and didn’t have to be all read in order or collected or leave you in suspense. And they were better that way, gol ding it.
I have an entry for series in my book db, and it sometimes is very hard to figure out where a book goes in the series. Often the series information is stuck inside by the title page, or hidden in the blurb. I have no idea of why publishers do this - maybe to snooker people into buying a later book and thus forcing them to go back and buy the earlier ones?
I’m a bit more lenient about the first book in a series. Long before the one mentioned in the link, Phil Farmer ended the first Opar book in the middle of a showdown. Some reviewers were mad, not to mention readers.
There’s an old anecdote, and it may be about Farmer and it may be about this book, I don’t remember any more.
In any case, the publisher involved printed books that were 180 pages long. Period. This one book came in a bit over that length. So they dropped the ending and printed the first 180 pages.
Apocryphal? Maybe. But it’s well known and people swear that it’s true and it’s not beyond the bounds of what some publishers would do.
It’s not just SF that does this. I was just complaining about this same issue the other day, concerning a mystery series I’m reading. The list of books inside the front cover doesn’t necessarily list the books in order, and if it does, it sometimes leaves out the book you’re holding in your hand so you can’t tell where it fits into the sequence.
I think they’re afraid that you will pick up book #10 and just put it back down when you see that it’s part of a series.
And it gets more complicated when authors write prequels, or new books that fit into an early part of their timeline. I’m fine with that, but I still want to read them in the order they were published, so I have to do some research to get them straight.
I think I’ve heard that one. But the complete book would have been well over 180 pages. Not that I’d put it past a publisher - my local paper cuts off wire service stories so that they fit - sometimes just after a reporter poses a rhetorical question and before they answer. That’s why we pay big bucks to get the Times delivered.
One series that did it right was the original Lancer Conan series, published before he became a household world. The books were numbered by order of publication on the cover, but inside they had the order of where the book would fit in the series - with spaces for books coming and not yet published. Now that was well done.
Maybe that’s part of my problem - I kind of don’t expect there to be sequels. Of course in my case I had no way of knowing that there was a sequel to that book, the point being that I didn’t want to know anything about the book before I read it. My fault. (I did find a copy of Olympos, but I haven’t started it yet).