> I don't think this'll work. Authors tend to have phases of inspiration, and lulls in between. The pressure of the next episode would lead to 'phoned in' chapters.
Not just from the author's side. From a reader's perspective this would also not work. I don't want to start reading a book a chapter at a time. I don't even like reading books that are part of an unfinished series.
For me, as someone who reads quite a lot of books, there is nothing more satisfying than finding a new series that you are interested in and discovering the entire series is already finished. You can then just binge through the whole thing.
The worst is when a series is 5-6 books in, you binge through them in a couple of days and when the next part is released you can't be bothered because you have forgotten what it was about.
I wish authors would take the Netflix approach and just finish the entire series before releasing it.
> The worst is when a series is 5-6 books in, you binge through them in a couple of days and when the next part is released you can't be bothered because you have forgotten what it was about.
While I know that feeling somewhat…
> I wish authors would take the Netflix approach and just finish the entire series before releasing it.
… how would that work when series of books (at least the ones I'm familiar with) are often written and published over the course of several years, or perhaps in some cases even decades, i.e. much slower than your typical Netflix series?
At those timescales, that means authors would be getting neither feedback nor payments for a very long time, and it also increases the risk that in the end, the whole thing might not be published at all.
While unfinished series of books (or unfinished books themselves for that matter) can indeed be frustrating from a certain point of view, I still think the world is mostly a better place for them having already been published even in that unfinished state.
There are enough books where the first few were good, but the final was terrible that I'm not sure I agree. I've learned to be happy with never having finished some series because they started great but by the middle weren't worth finding out how it finished.
Maybe novels in a series need the literary equivalent of a recap, so one can remember who the characters were and what happened, instead of having to reread the whole series to understand the newest book in the series when it comes out.
The effort of picking a story up again is a fair argument against. There are some genres (crime fiction) where I think that the anticipation of waiting for a chapter could genuinely add to the experience.
Yes exactly, I don't like this at all either.. I know I will get less absorbed in the story if I have to wait a month in between each chapter and in the end I'll just give up.
Not just from the author's side. From a reader's perspective this would also not work. I don't want to start reading a book a chapter at a time. I don't even like reading books that are part of an unfinished series.
For me, as someone who reads quite a lot of books, there is nothing more satisfying than finding a new series that you are interested in and discovering the entire series is already finished. You can then just binge through the whole thing.
The worst is when a series is 5-6 books in, you binge through them in a couple of days and when the next part is released you can't be bothered because you have forgotten what it was about.
I wish authors would take the Netflix approach and just finish the entire series before releasing it.