The pros and cons of writing a series

Recently I've been reading a book in a series by a highly-regarded author.  She has been Hugo nominated this year, so I figured that her writing must be good.

How wrong I was.  I struggled through a lame narrative that was mainly told not shown.  Even the drama of a major battle seemed to have the quality of being related from a distance, with tedious details that never once put me amongst the danger of the fighting.  I know that I have a bad habit of rapidly getting impatient with long descriptions, but there were many sections in this book where I skim-read over them.  The story left me feeling distinctly underwhelmed, and I won't be reading any more of that series.

This experience set me thinking about the pros and cons of writing a series.  From a marketing point of view, publishers love series.  Especially by a new author, where they and the author have a struggle to be recognized in the market.  

This is where series branding comes in.  Building recognition of an author's work by providing readers with more of a character they've already fallen in love with seems like a good marketing move.  And here is where one of the tensions between writing as a business and writing as the passion of our hearts surfaces.  If a series has been successful, the author will come under pressure to produce more of the same.  Why break a winning a formula?

But what if the author has fallen out of love with these characters, or simply has nothing more to say  about them?  Producing a book out of duty isn't going to have the passion that makes the story come alive.  And readers can sense that lack of passion.  Another danger of a series is that many readers may not engage with it.  If you don't grab them with the first book of the series, chances are a reader isn't going to bother with the rest of it.  And even bestseller authors regularly lose readers here.  Then every further book in that series is a lost opportunity to gain more readers.

Maybe that's why so many authors produce a series interspersed with standalone books.  They stand a chance of capturing new readers with the standalones who don't like the series.  And there's another reason to go beyond one series.  When your vampire PI is no longer fashionable and your series is cancelled, you have other books to be known by.  Series plus standalones seems to be the perfect balance of familiarity plus originality to me.