We Need a Worlds Category
When you look for and add books on the major ebook platforms there is always the option to indicate what Series the book is part of if. The thing is... I’m kind of wary of series. As a reader, I like my fantasy books to give me a complete story. I don’t want to committ to some 10-book series, which if I’m being honest, is often just an overstretched and fluffed up single story that could have fit in one or two books. Series make me think of Bilbo saying he felt like butter scraped over too much bread. But series are popular, especially in the fantasy world, so am I alone or is there a secret to the popularity of series, despite their flaws.
In my opinion fantasy readers love series not because they necessarily want to spend 7 books reading one long story and waiting for it to develop, but because of the world-building. One
of the best things about fantasy books is that they can take you to a different world, a world which you will enjoy spending time in and when you close the book at the end you will miss being in that world. THAT, in my opinion,
is what we’re all searching for when we go for long series. We want a world that will be so good it will be worth revisiting and so we look for series to reassure us that when we do close the book at the end there will
be more in that same awesome world. We want a world we can dive that deeply into. A world we can explore for more than the length of a single volume.
The thing is, there are other ways to explore a single world. It’s not unheard of, but seems to be forgotten or ignored now, but there are authors who write many novels in the same
world without having to connect those novels chronologically into one series of books that have to be read in a certain order. There are authors who dive deeply into a world over and over without having to go back to the same
characters again and again or feeling the need to stretch one story out beyond its natural life.
The biggest example of this is Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels. They were all set on the same planet, but they each had their own complete, standalone story and they focused on different
characters and were set in different time periods, sometimes thousands of years apart. There are many other examples of this type of world-building, some more famous than others. You can even consider Tolkien’s Hobbit
and LoTR to be an example of this. The Hobbit and LoTR stand alone. You don’t need to read one before the other in order to understand them and in fact, even though they take place one after another chronologically,
they are very different books in the tone and feel and writing style. Yes, there are some overlapping characters, but they’re not really in a series, what really connects those two stories is that they take place in
Middle Earth.
Personally, I would really like to see more of this type of world-building where authors write complete, standalone novels that are all set in the same world so readers can dip in and
out of their world from any point and still enjoy the magic of it. (And to plug my own books I’m doing this with my “Tales from the Circle” which includes short stories, novellas, and novels all set in different
times and locations within the same world.)
What I would also really love to see is a way to label and find these types of novels much more easily. It would be great if, along with the option to see what series something is in
and what book # it is in that series, we could also have a way to denote these more loosely connected books set in the same world, something that shows us what world a book is in without the need for series numbering.
