It would be interesting to contrast this with YA series. Books like Sweet Valley are almost too stand-alone, in that once you've read a few you know that yes, Elizabeth likes school and Jessica likes fashion. In general though, I see more of a trend of keeping books accessible to new readers. The best is when books can do this without totally summing up past books, not just to spare repeat readers or avoid lengthy exposition, but so that you might actually have some interest in going back and reading an earlier book. I think Terry Pratchett is very good at that, although his series is less series-y than many.

The problem I have with long-running series, with the exception of Ice and Fire, is that the angst of the protagonist gets so boring after the fourth or fifth book. "Be the dragon, don't be the dragon, I just don't care anymore!" I think--I hope--that some fantasy writers could look back to the single title books. I wouldn't even mind if they were in the same world--just so long as the story started and ended in the book.

Terry Pratchett's Discworld seems to be a model of this kind of series. Even upon numerous rereadings of the 30+ books, I rarely get the feeling he's having to resort to extensive recaps to bring readers up to speed. BTW, I can understand why you wouldn't name the series being criticized, but is there a reason not to mention the one that was well-done?

As an ex-fantasy fan who burned out 20 years ago after being dragged from pillar to post by Stephen R. Donaldson, I only read stand-alones like Between The Rivers by Harry Turtledove and classic masters like L. Sprague DeCamp. Too many writers in this field seem to regard themselves as chroniclers of Mosaic stature who can't be bothered with petty mortal concerns like entertainment value-it's called fantasy for a reason, knuckleheads!

Sasha: The YA comparison is an interesting one. I'm not well enough versed in the current field to discuss it, but I do remember many of E. Nesbit's books being very much linked but complete in themselves, and I appreciated that even as a child.

Kat: I couldn't agree more.

Bill: I haven't read the most recent ten or so Discworld Books (solely due to lack of time), and I get the sense that I would want to read the intervening ones rather than starting with the most recent Night Watch or Death book. On the other hand, some of the Discworld standalones are truly self-contained and lovely. As for not naming books, I hold back only because the full PW reviews of all three titles have not yet seen print, and I wouldn't want to drop hints.

Kevin: A lot of modern epic fantasy seems to be more about exploring worlds than about storytelling. Perhaps the appeal of standalones is that they have to fit an entire story into one book, cutting back on the worldbuilding and focusing more on things like plot and character development.

I don't review fantasy but I have been asked to review mystery/suspense titles that are well along in the series. If I'm not familiar with the series, I always go back and read the first book, and skim a couple more just to get an idea of what's going on. I don't know what kind of lead time you give your reviewers, but the couple of weeks I usually get is enough for me to get comfortable with a series and then review the latest. Of course, I'm not having to figure out entire new worlds!

As much as I love Diana Gabaldon's "Outlander" series, I stopped reading after The Fiery Cross. I couldn't keep all the characters straight, waiting for a year (or two or three) until the next book. This has happened to me so many times, that I gave up. Now I'm waiting until any series is declared officially complete or the author has gone to sing with the choir immortal. And anyone picking up the series or making a perfectly wonderful stand-alone book into a series should be horsewhipped. Or at the very least, scolded fiercely.

I disagree. Every genre has its conventions—in mysteries, the criminal is always a character you've previously met; in chick lit, the gal always gets the "right" guy, whatever flirting she may have done with the wrong guy; and in epic fantasies, the exposition of the universe is in the first book in the series. As a fantasy fan, if I'm going to check out a new author or series, I know to find out which book is the first (conveniently marked on the cover as "Series Title, Book 1"), and start there. Why would anyone start a series in the middle? The first book is always the true entryway into a series, no matter what the latest release in that series is. This post feels like someone criticizing a Western because it doesn't spend enough time telling readers why the characters all ride horses.

By the way, I agree that Steven Brust's Jhereg series is one of the best ever written. But I would call that series "light" fantasy. If you compare it to his Phoenix Guards series, which is more epic (even if pseudo-epic), those books are not standalone at all.

I cannot stand it when I get a series book to review for the simple fact that half the time authors leave out the details you need to know about the long-term series plot, or better understand the relationships of characters. If it has potential, then I'll go buy the first in the series and read up to it, but who has time to do that with each one? Certainly not me. It really has to seduce me in order to do that. It does not take that much to tweak an MS to include these references. But authors and publishers need to understand the importance before it will happen. You'd think in this climate they'd want to attract as many fans as possible - and improve the bottom line.

I think what's lacking so much of the time is the craftsmanship needed to make any given book in a trilogy, series, etc. the ability to fly on it's own as a stand-alone, thus giving the reader the option of backtracking later if wished. Mick Farren's Victor Renquist vampire series from a few years back was a good example-it ran out of gas after about 5 books and was dropped, but I own 2 from the middle that functioned well either way. A benchmark I always try to measure by....

BookBitch: Lead time varies, but we do always ask that reviewers research the earlier books as best they can. In the case of a doorstopper fantasy series, where each book is 600 pages and there are multiple earlier books, it often just isn't possible to read all the early installments.

Doug: A new reader might start a series in the middle if that's the only book the library or bookstore has that looks like what they want to read, or if a friend said "Hey, you'd like books by _____" and that's the only book available by that author. I agree that the first book is generally the best place to start, but sometimes the first book written isn't the first chronologically (would you suggest that readers new to Narnia start with The Magician's Nephew or with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?), and sometimes it's out of print or otherwise can't be acquired. An author can't rely on a reader behaving the way you do; they have to expect every book to be some reader's first encounter with their writing, and I think they would do well to plot and write accordingly.

Doug: I don't read much mystery and can't speak for that, but there are certainly chick lit books where the girl ends up with the wrong guy, or no guy at all. And good world building, in my opinion, is often spread throughout a series as the characters travel or learn more about the world.

Why would anyone start a series in the middle? The first book is always the true entryway into a series, no matter what the latest release in that series is. But even if everyone starts at book one (and as others have said, they don't) ... time passes between volumes. Readers, being human, forget things. If a book relies too much on prior knowledge, I think that's a problem even for dedicated readers of a series.

I like this discussion! Great topic! A couple of thoughts...Lois McMaster Bujold has written on the nature of certain series being their own literary form distinct from the novel (not true of all series however she points out). She also speaks to the rigorous requirements this narrative form choice imposes on the author, including "access points" for new readers while not alienating the already involved reader base. Perhaps the challenge is that fantasy series tend to have more of the characteristics of this type of posited literary form? Mysteries and YA series tend to be episodic with the better ones enriching characters as the "story time" advances but still...episodic. Bujold's idea is the series in which the new stories are dependent on what has happened earlier. It occurs to me that some of the dynamic is similar to a TV show narrative arc. I've definitely had experiences where I didn't understand friends or media's positive responses to a show because I started "late" and missed the 'entry' point...thanks to Netflix/DVD releases this is becoming less of an issue for people who missed out and helps explain TV shows explosive growth as DVDs.

Also, series increase the chance of a retailer being out of the entry works at the time one encounters one, hence the aforemntioned rule... Try DarkLost by Mick Farren as a textbook example-I found this one by itself on the shelf and didn't realize it was #2 in a series for quite some time into the narrative.

Peronally, I'm a very big reader of F/SF novels, and much prefer to drop back to the start of a series in 99% of cases anyway. As such, at least for the trilogies and shorter series where I have a reasonable expectation of reading the whole thing at one go, this kind of weakness is really a non-issue for me. If book 2 or 3 or 6 catches my eye, I just look back on the shelf for book 1 and pick that one up instead; I've been doing it for so many years that it's pretty much automatic now. So much so, in fact, that it does bother me, significantly, when books don't lay out the timeline/ordering of a series on the cover or just inside. I've left books on the shelf for the sole reason that they lacked this sort of easy series reference. I really REALLY dislike Kevin's experience, where a book in a series isn't even clearly marked as such -- that feels like false marketing to me, and I often treat it as such, avoiding books from the same author in the future. As implied above, there's one exception to my sentiment about series books standing along: if one is going to write a really epic series stretched over a real-life decade or more, then any fans you draw in early are going to be left hanging for long dry spells, and you have to keep the books relatively standalone or you betray any loyalty those fans might show. I don't often deliberately 'quit' a series half-way through, but when -- even having read all the previous books in the series -- I feel like the poor reviewers you mentioned due to the time between book releases, I will make an exception.

I have used stand-alones as an intro to the author - e.g., Laura Lippman's To the Power of Three - then I read By a Spider's Thread, a Tess Monaghan book - not the first or even the fifth. I have since gone back and read the rest of the Tess series in chronological order, as well as her other stand-alones. With fantasy, epic or otherwise, I have decided to never read a series (King's Dark Tower, Martin's Fire & Ice, etc.) until it's all published and easily available. The analogy to TV series arcs is very apt: I had friends who had "Buffy" nights when the TV show was airing, and I went a couple times, but was always lost because of the multiple characters and plotlines. I have since watched the entire series (and Angel) on DVD, as well as other shows like Alias, Medium, Dead Zone, Bones, etc. The old-time pulp writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs knew this - the Tarzan series do follow a chronology, but they can pretty much be read in any order. Same with Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, although I think in most cases it is preferable to read them in the correct sequence. As far as out of print books go, most are easily available online (as long as you don't require first editions).

Marisa: "Episodic" is the perfect term, but I'm amused that the first thing it brought to mind is Shadow Unit, where I think that every episode that's been posted so far stands pretty well on its own as a story. On the other hand, I've been reading each one as it goes up, and I might feel differently if I'd missed one or two and couldn't go back and read them immediately. I recommended it to my husband and he said "I'll wait until it comes out on DVD"--that is, until the entire season is up and he can read them all at once. Everyone has different ways of consuming media. I really think authors who make their work only accessible to people who read books a certain way are missing out on huge numbers of potential fans.

Charles: Your mention of Burroughs and Doyle is very apt. I'd go back even further to the serialized novels of Dumas and Dickens; I bet anyone who tried to read just one chapter of one of their books felt about as lost as you did when trying to watch individual episodes of Buffy. Obviously this isn't a new problem, nor is the standalone story a new solution. That does bring me back to my original question, though, of why so many authors and editors seem not to realize that it is a problem.

It may very well be that "so many authors and editors seem not to realize that it is a problem". I think one possibility is that it is a market ineffeciency problem and very probably a literary form problem. The first problem is that series are attractive since they sell multiple books to the same reader for less effort (author, editorial, marketing) than selling the same number of stand-alones to the same reader. I doubt authors and editors have analyzed their efforts and $s to determine that taking the time and effort to craft the writing and marketing of series to create "access points" to new readers in every title in a series would yield better sales and more fans. I think a few authors/editors do it intentionally (Bujold certainly does) and are more successful in readers and sales as a result. It would be interesting to see the real data of sales between different series that are more 'accessible' and less. But then you hit the issue of the actual content of the series and they can be written in such different styles, worlds, density, that it may drift more into the literary form problem. Addressing new readers accessibility issues is NOT talk about in the workshops, books, and classes for writing series. At least, I've never heard or seen it come up. The focus is much more on world building and continuity issues and character dynamics strong enough to carry multiple titles. Perhaps your questioning it will help!

As far as YA books go, there are certainly recent series that are continuity-heavy (Darren Shan's Cirque du Freak books come to mind, as does a minor collection of books written by some woman named Rowling). But the solution for them is the same as for "adult" books: Provide a recap, either explicitly (two pages at the beginning) or implicitly (there's no need for "as you know, bob" conversations, but it's perfectly workable for, say, the hero to idly scratch at the scar he got while saving the village from the dragon). Not everything needs to be recapped; as a ten-year-old, I picked up Restaurant at the End of the Universe and loved it. As I recall, didn't ever learn how Zaphod and Trillian met while reading that, because it didn't affect my understanding of the story. I did, however, get a summary of the events that led to the conflict in the opening chapters, because that was relevant.

Great post, Rose. Since I'm in the midst of writing Book 2 of what I expect to be a long series, I've been discussing this at length with my editor. I'm operating under the assumption that this title has to stand alone as its own story, but that means somehow getting across the important details in my history. That's a real balancing act. Some writers do too much lengthy exposition of every detail that happened in previous books, and I catch myself turning pages to keep from having to review it all. Of course, since I'm podcasting my work as well, it means struggling with an even more difficult "episodic" issue, as some listeners are coming into the title in the middle of the book. I have no idea how to deal with that one.

A good point about the editors not thinking about new readers, they are just interested in more books for existing fans. Let's face it, a lot of people will read an author no matter what book it is, but a series also offers a predictable 'world' which does not have to be created from scratch. The trouble is, I think a lot of authors actually get either lost in their own head, or just plain lazy. It is great to want to make the most of some brilliant characters, a group who share similar values but possesses different characteristics and have different fates. The trouble is, especially with romance, that the author often loses sight of who the hero and heroine are, and the fact that in a romance, we are supposed to see a couple falling in love. In paranormal and fantasy, there is a quest of some sort. If you don't fulfill it at the end of the book, at least take it to some logical resting place. The trouble I see is that a lot of writing now has a very unfinished, rushed to get it on the shelves feel to them which diminishes the quality of the book and leaves the reader feeling cheated. One writer mentioned romance--yes, they are carrying on into other books til they finally get the happily ever after, but I personally don't like those books unless there is a very clear, and quite suspenseful and pressing reason to leave them hanging. In one of my past series, they survive the Famine in Ireland, and then the ship's journey to Canada. Book 2 recounts the heroine's adventures in Canada, and then going back to Ireland. Trying to cram all 4 into one book would have been huge. In my paranormal series, Druids of Destiny, I have three brothers avenging their family. Each met their true love along the way. A trilogy works well for a lot of reasons. So with a longer series, one idea might be to structure it as linked trilogies, so that there are access points in the series for new readers to enter easily. One other point is that for a long series, the earlier books might go out of print, so the new reader would have no chance of being able to catch up. A list of characters, their relationships, places, and a glossary if they are inventing their own world, would help too, and can easily be added to as the series goes on. Once again, though, the central issue I see is that the 'series' is being rushed, and the characters are suffering as a result, and leading readers to feel cheated. Sorcha MacMurrough The Rakehell Regency Series

This doesn't make a lot of sense to me, I have to admit. A series is a story in itself, and should be taken as a whole. It's a story that has been separated into chunks for the sake of readability, and to get each installment out in a timely fashion. To me, complaining that you can't understand what's going on in a book when you started in the middle of the series, is functionally not even remotely different from complaining that you can't understand what's going on in a book when you started at a chapter in the middle of the book. The books are like chapters in a whole story. So.. start at the beginning, and it'll make sense. I had no idea that people actually didn't bother to do that. It certainly never crossed my mind to start reading the Song of Ice and Fire series with Storm of Swords, just because that was the book that came out when I took an interest in the series.