Book Series - the will to hang on
I am big into the fantasy genre. Swords and lasers, witches and wizards.
Fantasy authors love to structure their work into a Series. Some in a modest trilogy, or a moderate pentalogy (A Song of Ice and Fire). But others may get carried away... such as 14 books for Wheel of Time, or 41 for Discworld.
What do you do when you are thousands of pages deep into a series, multiple books behind you, but just aren't feeling it anymore? Do you justify continuing, or cut your losses?
I scraped book series ratings for 30 top fantasy series' list on goodreads.com.
The number of user ratings gives us an idea of how many people read each book in a series. As expected, we see a big drop-off between book 1 and 2. You gave it a shot, but aren't ready to commit further down the series. For example there are 8.2 million ratings for the first Harry Potter novel, but "only" 3.2 million for the sequel. That's a 61% drop!
On the left are some popular series - readership sharply declines after book 1, but not so much after that.
On the right I summarize readership across the 30 series', the typical drop in readership between book 1 and 2 is 53%!. The drop between subsequent books is much less. People don't seem to give up!
If you are an author, try to hook people on for at least 3 books... future sales will be nearly guaranteed!