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The number of books in the series is irrelevant. What matters is whether you still have story to tell. JK Rowling planned the Potter series to have seven books; Harry's arc is finished. GRRMartin...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2019-12-13T12:00:25Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/13053 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T03:47:47Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/13053 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
The number of books in the series is irrelevant. What matters is whether you still have story to tell. JK Rowling planned the Potter series to have seven books; Harry's arc is finished. GRRMartin originally planned for four, but he's got so much to say that he's expanded to at least seven (and eight wouldn't surprise me if he lives that long). David Eddings's Belgariad was written as three books, but the publisher broke it somewhat arbitrarily into five. CE Murphy's Walker Papers needed 10 books and a novella to complete Joanne's story. Conversely, I thought Carol Berg's _Transformation_ was a perfect standalone, and I disliked the second and third in the rai-kirah trilogy. I thought the concepts introduced were boring and obscure, and didn't add anything. So it doesn't matter how many books are in the series. It matters whether the characters still have interesting things to do, and whether we care about them doing those things. That can take one book or twenty.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2014-10-08T21:31:32Z (about 10 years ago)
Original score: 3