Why are there so many Trilogies written?

Dave Vicks said:
Do the Authors need the money?
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I believe trilogies are more of a movie thing than fiction. Many of the most popular book series are longer than three books (even the LOTR was in reality six books that were later made into a trio of two-part novels).
 
KatG said:
"When it's time" is a subjective measurement. And for many stories, especially big sagas, it's not a matter of the author "milking" it. It just goes longer than the author originally thought it would. Jordan, for instance, planned a seven book series and had quite a lot of notes, fragments and other outline material (which was a good thing to help complete the series to his specifications after he died.) But despite his world/history planning, he was an intuitive seat of the pants writer when it came to text (not unusual in writers) and so the very large story he planned got bigger and broader as he went. He probably would have been happy to have it done in seven books, but it turned out not to be how his mind worked with this particular story. So much so that Brandon Sanderson, hired to finish the long saga, had to do it in three books to cover all the story Jordan had developed in outline and text fragments. (Other stories/series Jordan did were shorter.)

The same thing happened with GRRM, who also has extensive world-building and outlining material but is even more a seat of the pantser on narrative and character than Jordan was. He conceived of Song as a duology, sold it as a trilogy, then realized he would need two more books for a quintet to do the whole story he imagined, then realized the time gap in the middle would need to be actually covered for the story to work, ran into a mess trying to do that middle gap book, split it laterally and is now consequently about 3/4 through doing Book 6 and we're all crossing our fingers. That's not a milking issue, it's an author brain process issue that is partly due to how extensive and broad the saga series is -- one of the main things that fans like about the series.

Asimov had an enormous organizational system for the Foundation stories that he kept on a bulletin board in his office. Robert J. Sawyer wrote his popular Far-Seer series without any outline at all or even a plot. He instead wrote scenes completely by the pants and then figured out what the text bits that would connect the scenes would be afterwards. Most SFF authors (and other types of authors as well) use a mix of extensive outlining/world-building with seat of the pants character and textual creation. Wendy's situation is not at all unusual. She figured out by trial and error what she needed in order for her brain to be able to work out the main story ideas she wanted, which then gives her areas/setting for other story ideas she can later pursue. Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, for instance, are connected but often stand separately. It worked for what he was doing.

Chuck Wendig wrote a huge plague apocalyptic science fiction story, Wanderers, that had some room for more but was originally conceived and planned as a standalone. But while he was writing/revising it, he came up with ideas for how a sequel could be effectively developed, so he's doing a sequel. Though Wanderers became a bestseller (and disturbingly prescient,) he's not doing it to milk the book -- he has four other book projects coming out over the next couple of years. He just had an idea that worked for him.

It also often happens that an author may plan a larger series and then decide they are done with it early. They lose interest in that world, set of characters, plot ideas before their fans may and move on to another project. Even more commonly, they may drop a book or series for years, decades even, and then have an idea and come back and write some more. Take a look at numerous older SFFH series -- you often find a time gap in the middle. Ellen Kushner very famously wrote Swordspoint, published in 1987. She didn't write a sequel, The Fall of Kings, until 2002 with a co-author and then wrote a third one, The Privilege of the Sword for 2006. Steven Boyett wrote the cult classic post-apoc fantasy Ariel in 1983. Over two decades later he wrote a bestselling sequel, Elegy Beach, published in 2009. Glen Cook has outline plans for two more Black Company novels, the last of which so far was published in 2000, and wrote an eighth book in his Dread Empire series in 2012 after the last one published in 1988. He did do that in part for the reissuing of the Dread Empire series but also because he had Dread Empire ideas he hadn't gotten around to yet. Most SFF authors have a mix of series of various lengths and standalone novels, with possibly some short story collections as well.

And that's the situation in written fiction by and large. People assume it's all marketing decisions from on high but it very seldom is. While publishers may encourage authors to continue with a bestselling series or may bail out of a series that the author wants to continue, the shape/format of most series comes from what the authors found as the way their stories worked for them to write. Fiction authors are really bad at estimating how long it's going to take them to do a story, how many books they'll do in a series, whether they'll ever write in a universe they created again or not, how many series they can juggle for the prolific authors, etc. The way they write one series may not be the way that they write another series or a standalone novel. The amount of research they'll do will vary. And life stuff can make it harder or easier for a fiction writer to write a project.

A trilogy provides a model and it is a three act model, one of the ones we're most familiar with in creating -- and reading or watching -- stories. So author brains naturally turn to it and it's been particularly useful in SFF (not as popular in other categories of stories.) But author brains are just as likely to eschew the trilogy format and do something else.
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It is very subjective. All of us have different levels of tolerance when a series begins to get clumsy & forced. While I like to finish what I start...usually. I do leave some series unfinished.
 
It's a very Indo European thing. Hardly any other languages have good better best.

It's deep in the makeup of the Indo Europeans. Just feels right.
 
The OP is very sparse, but I take it they're not singling out the number three, but simply multiple volumes.

Financial incentives aside, I think it is rather simple: People like immersing themselves in a world and story for more than just a brief dip. Game of Thrones was so successful because it was eight seasons; a single season mini-series just wouldn't have had the same drawing power, and wouldn't have been able to do justice to the story being told.

Now I've been reading a lot of SF from the 60s and 70s and enjoying the fact that most of the novels are around 200 pages, give or take. Reading a Zelazny book, for instance, is an experience - like going to the movies, you're in, immerse yourself, and then it is over. It takes me about a week to finish a book, whereas reading a Malazan novel takes a month or two - and there are ten of them! I loved them but only read the first three because I didn't want to dedicate a year's worth of reading to a single story.

But shorter length also has its drawbacks. You don't get to really explore, to get to know the characters. It is like a three minute song vs a twenty minute prog rock epic.

Thankfully both have their place. There's been a recent resurgence in novellas, which aren't much shorter than many novels from older eras. There is no "best length" for a story; well, actually there is, but it is specific to the story being told. As Ursula K Le Guin put it, a writer should use as many words as they need to tell the story that they're telling - no more, no less. That really depends upon the story. Some stories are best told as short stories, some as novellas, others as novels, and even some as trilogies or open-ended longer series. Tastes vary.

That said, there are lots of cases where authors, perhaps financially motivated (and nudged by their publisher), indulgently extend stories far beyond the "best length for the job" guidance of Le Guin. A lot of books are padded with excessive description and unnecessary segments. A big book like Dune has little if any stray parts. It is "full-bodied." But I've read other big books that felt excessively padded, like most of the Wheel of Time series.

On a side but related note, I just started HBO's His Dark Materials series and find it far better than the film, which I saw some years ago and was a rather forgettable experience. Or the new Zach Snyder cut of Justice League - it is a far superior film to Joss Whedon's theatrical release (and twice the length at four hours!). It kind of feels like Whedon's version was a very long trailer with one action scene after the other, and the underlying story only implied. The point being, there's a common view that shorter is somehow better or more artistic, and that isn't always the case.
 
Alchemist said:
Now I've been reading a lot of SF from the 60s and 70s and enjoying the fact that most of the novels are around 200 pages, give or take. Reading a Zelazny book, for instance, is an experience - like going to the movies, you're in, immerse yourself, and then it is over.
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The novels from the 1960's and 1970's were often elongated novellas or multiple novellas/short fiction written as a series and published first in magazines and then bundled together for a novel. So they were shorter on average than books began to get in the 1970's and 1980's as books became more the focus of the category market than magazines (which had their pay rates stagnated.) Many of the novels at that time were also published as mass market paperback originals and while thick mass market paperbacks were very common in the 1960's and 1970's, there were a number of advantages for SFF authors to do shorter ones and many SFF publishing imprints wanted shorter works for that format size due to the production costs and discounts of bulk sales.

When market conditions changed, including bulk production costs, thicker books that did not begin as magazine publications became more common. Hardcover and trade paperback first printings became more common for small runs in the 1990's when the wholesale market slowly shrunk (which also greatly shrunk the magazine market for awhile.) The success of some very large SFF titles in the late 1980's and 1990's meant publishers were more comfortable taking on larger novels because they knew they could find an audience for them. And the development of e-book publishing also allows books to be both very short or very long with much less production cost when it's e-book only.

The development of novellas from prominent authors started with electronic publishing online and online magazine publications, particularly by Tor. Those novellas could then -- like they did in the 1960's and 1970's -- be put into print form and e-book for unit sales and this has been well received in the marketplace. And a number of these novellas have been turned into novella series, such as Martha Wells' bestselling Murder Bot stories. But there again it's authors coming up with stories that work out for them as novellas, which then can be placed into current sales channels for novellas/short novels.
 
Some authors just like the long form.
Tolkien himself said that with LOTR he fancied having a go at something lengthy and epic.
 
Stanley Steamboy said:
You guys are just riffing on my post!

Humans like threes. Period. In stone age societies, counting systems offer 1, 2, 3 and more than 3.
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Yes, in art you use three main features, triangles. Everyone like doing things in threes to greater or lesser extent, it seems, including me. I thought people with OCD especially liked threes, but I see an article saying they like four... I found some interesting things on Wikipedia:


The rule of three can refer to a collection of three words, phrases, sentences, lines, paragraphs/stanzas, chapters/sections of writing and even whole books.[2][4] The three elements together are known as a triad.[5] The technique is used not just in prose, but also in poetry, oral storytelling, films, and advertising. In photography, the rule of thirds produces a similar effect by dividing an image into three vertically and horizontally.[6]
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)#cite_note-6
 
Why are there so many Trilogies written?

It's a reflection of the power that marketing departments have in corporatized publishing.

I once had a story sale to a major digest magazine. I used it as a pitch to a publisher for a novel. They liked the concept and said, "We'll take three."

Trilogies used to be rare. Then The Lord of the Rings, written as one big Doestevsky-sized novel, but divided into three volumes by a publisher who thought people would rebound off the fat spine and fat price.

Since then, fantasy readers have been conditioned to expect trilogies (and completely open-ended series), so authors are urged (cattle-prodded?) to produce them. They have become a basic unit of fantasy publishing, just as movie-goers have been conditioned to expect blockbuster summer movie concepts to go on and on and on.

Even when the authors die, their estates are encouraged to let the publishers hire hacks to carry on with the concepts and characters.

It's all about the corporate return on investment.
 
Matthew Hughes said:
Trilogies used to be rare. Then The Lord of the Rings, written as one big Doestevsky-sized novel, but divided into three volumes by a publisher who thought people would rebound off the fat spine and fat price.
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Well, fiction trilogies might have been rare, but the ancient Greeks invented them for plays. So it wasn't a new concept in fiction, just something that was being newly applied to one type of fiction.

The rise of trilogies coincided with the demise of serialization. I'm good with that. I'd rather a good story get chopped into three long chunks than twenty tiny ones.
 
Ropie said:
When I was young I called them Triologies :rolleyes:



That's a poor bit of writing on Wikipedia. The rule of thirds divides a picture vertically and horizontally into two! One section is 2/3 and the other 1/3.
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I think it would be all right if they said "or."

So when you were young did you read any sets of medical thrillers or such and call them biologies?
 
Do they intend to write a trilogy from the start or do they figure that they might as well make more money if the first book is a success?

Maybe the story was intended to be one book but ran too long but was a success and paid for the continuation.

Lois Bujold said she was continuing into what became her second book, Barrayar, before separating the first, Shards of Honor.
 
Success doesn't pay for continuation. Determination to write, or giving in to entreaty of agent/publisher results in continuations.
Success puts food on table, roof overhead and clothes on the back.
Harper Lee and GRR Martin.

I'd say the reasons for trilogies are varied and financial calculations are low on list though it can be a reason.
 
I'd say that about 75% of trilogies are planned. Others are standalones that became trilogies.
 
@KatG How many series do you think were envisaged as Trilogies, but either author, publisher, agent or fans wanted more?
 
Ray McCarthy said:
@KatG How many series do you think were envisaged as Trilogies, but either author, publisher, agent or fans wanted more?
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It's really much more a matter of how the author's brain works than anything else. Authors who plan a trilogy often have other sub-series/sequel series in mind and material for it and they then put those to work. Or they get an idea for a new set in the same universe as they are writing the first trilogy. Or they finish the trilogy, go off and do a bunch of other things and then return to that story world years later and do a new set of books because they had some ideas or ideas that they are finally getting back to. Sometimes there was too much stuff for the author to feel comfortable to put in one trilogy so they spin that material off into a new trilogy or a side trilogy. It just depends. (And remember, tons of authors don't do trilogies. They like to do standalones or they do five to six book series or they do an urban fantasy mystery-style series that goes on for fifteen books, etc.)

If a trilogy does well, the publisher may suggest that the author try more books in that story world -- but not necessarily a second trilogy. Or the author's agent may suggest it. But the author doesn't necessarily want or do it. Sticking with one story world can also be problematic for an author. Sales usually can drop with even a big selling series if it goes on for awhile and there can be more excitement from booksellers for a new series from a big selling author. A lot of authors, certainly some of the most prolific ones, like to jump around from sub-category to sub-category. They're more likely to take a break from a series for awhile and get back to it later. There have been cases of an author continuing to write works in a series because a publisher asked them to try it -- R.A. Salvatore for instance doing more tie-in Drizzit books because the publisher really needed the revenue and he kept finding ideas. But it's not the norm. Authors are like cats.

Fans, while authors like fans, they have little input on the whole thing. If fans would like more books in a series, then authors may wrack their brains to figure out if they have any more ideas for that story world and might, eventually, give them more stories. Or not.

Take for instance Glen Cook. For quite awhile there Cook would simply alternate between different series he was writing. He wrote The Dread Empire series and you can kind of see the first three books as a trilogy but it went 7 books. (And many years later he added an eighth book as part of a reprint deal for the series.) At the same time he wrote the first trilogy of the Black Company series. And then he wrote another book in that series. And then he wrote another two as a duology in the series. And then he wrote four books as a quartet in the series. And there is still possibly a last duology/trilogy to come. At the same time he wrote the Garrett P.I. series, which is a comic alt world mystery thriller series that ran fourteen books. He would just go back and forth between all of them, and including another trilogy series, a space opera science fiction series that he wrote as a trilogy and then added a fourth one a few years later, seven standalone SFF novels, and the newer Instrumentalities of the Night series, a quartet series. Fans definitely wanted more of all of those series. But Cook decided when he wanted to write/could write (he had a day job) any of them and in what forms.

Take Terry Pratchett. He wrote sub-series within one series world -- whichever group he wanted to write about or new group in one giant series. Plus he wrote stuff outside of the story world. Or take our old pal Joe Abercrombie. He wrote a trilogy with plans for more books. He then wrote three standalones in that story world that you can kind of see as a trilogy if you squint or simply the continuation of the first trilogy (which then does that make it a trilogy anymore?) And then he published a short story collection in the story world. He then went off and did a different trilogy series in a different world. And then he went back to doing a new trilogy which he wanted to mainly complete before releasing it, which is a sequel happening years later in the First Law story world. He planned a lot of that, at least loosely, but it wasn't exactly conventional series structure, nor was it dictated by his publisher.

So again, authors. Like cats. They are used to trilogies, they like trilogies and some of them write in trilogies or trilogies that mushroom. Sometimes publishers will just package three books in the same story world and give it a name as a trilogy. Or the author will go back and do that later for clarity's sake for the fans, etc. A trilogy is a three act saga. We are used to it, so some authors in SFF use it if the idea fits that way.
 
Personally if I see the words 'First of a new trilogy' on a book these days I'll put it down unread. I just haven't got the time. I'll be more inclined to read something that evolved into a trilogy or series. The author wrote a self-contained complete book then later went back and added a second volume when they realised they hadn't finished with that world... then maybe a third as the ideas came. I can dig that. But when a writer starts off with the intention of dragging me around the same universe for thousands of pages... sorry, include me out.
 
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