Do new writers stand a chance at a career without ambitions to write series?
Simply put, I've been noticing a general truth in bookstores: Nearly every new book on the shelf is part of a series - this is doubly true in the Fantasy and Sci-Fi genres, but no less true in others.
As a writer with no ambitions to write series and preferring to focus on one-shot works, does one still stand a chance in the world of modern publishing?
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I think you are looking in the wrong part of the bookstore. Certainly that is not true in general fiction (by far the largest part of the fiction marketplace). There are plenty of best selling authors who do not write series. John Grisham is a good example, or Michael Crichton.
It also depends on how you define series. There are a number of novelists who write independent works featuring the same characters, but with no other real continuity between one story and the next.
I just took a look at the latest NYT bestseller list and more than half the entries are clearly not series, while several of the others appear to be series only in the weakest sense of featuring the same characters as previous books, not as continuing an ongoing story.
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