Before I comment: the following has nothing to do with Melusine, which I haven't read and which I'm v. much looking forward to reading.
That said. *g* As a reader, I can say that I don't care whether there's no sequel, one sequel, or twenty. I want a satisfying experience reading the book that I've got in my hands at the moment.
Which doesn't mean that every thread has to be tied up. (You don't have to tie up every thread even if you're writing a standalone.) It just means--and there are lots of ways to pull it off--that the book has to be satisfying. If it's not, I'm not going to be interested in any sequels, because I won't trust the writer to do a better job with them.
My thought was that, if you know the story isn't supposed to be entirely resolved by the end of the book, are you perhaps more inclined to accept that things dropped are going to be picked up again? Recognizing it as a feature rather than a bug, I mean.
I don't know. I hope Mélusine is satisfying in and of itself--I intended it to be--but I don't get to be the judge of that.
It's a good question. Expectations are funny things. For me...maybe yes, maybe no? Maybe I'm not one to answer. I don't really read for plot. But I'm sitting here trying to figure out why I feel one way about Ricardo Pinto's first novel (explicitly the first of several) and another way about the Midnighters books. And the closest I can come to pinpointing it is--forward motion and sense of arc. Feeling like we got _somewhere,_ even if not to the end?
It would be interesting to see what people who look for series books say, versus those of us who learn towards standalones.
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That said. *g* As a reader, I can say that I don't care whether there's no sequel, one sequel, or twenty. I want a satisfying experience reading the book that I've got in my hands at the moment.
Which doesn't mean that every thread has to be tied up. (You don't have to tie up every thread even if you're writing a standalone.) It just means--and there are lots of ways to pull it off--that the book has to be satisfying. If it's not, I'm not going to be interested in any sequels, because I won't trust the writer to do a better job with them.
no subject
My thought was that, if you know the story isn't supposed to be entirely resolved by the end of the book, are you perhaps more inclined to accept that things dropped are going to be picked up again? Recognizing it as a feature rather than a bug, I mean.
I don't know. I hope Mélusine is satisfying in and of itself--I intended it to be--but I don't get to be the judge of that.
no subject
It would be interesting to see what people who look for series books say, versus those of us who learn towards standalones.
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---L.