Is the Mystery Series Dead?
The consumer habits of readers aren't the only ones changing
“Biggest” News in Books: Is the Mystery Series Dead?
Books in a series are no stranger to the bestseller list. Week-after-week you’ll see one of those little one line descriptions below the bestseller that reads something along the lines of: “the 27th book in the Dodge Cliff series.” Now, what’s peculiar to see in a description on a bestseller list is “the 3rd book in the [x] series.” In this case, that third book on this week’s bestsellers list is Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun—a mystery series that stars a single mom with a young kid and her sidekick who is also her nanny. Sounds charming. But Finlay is a totally oddity in publishing, because new series simply don’t really enter the picture and establish a bestselling baseline very often anymore.
But why? The bestseller list is typically chock full with books that are part of a series. Go back to the peak book and holiday season of November and December and you’ll reliably see the likes of Lee Child, Janet Evanovich, David Baldacci, Michael Connelly, and Nora Roberts dominating half the list. So books that are part of a series have a massive readership. It is also certainly not for lack of trying on editor’s and publisher’s end—we’re publishing many, many new series a year. That’s because the fiction series for publishers is something like the holy grail of the book business (besides, maybe, a good self-help author, but that’s a subject for another time). When series fiction is successful it promises reliable delivery, reliable sales, and writers who also make their living on writing and not by other means. This last point may not seem obvious, but a lot of people who can sell a lot of books can also sell a lot of something else with less effort, have a skill that’s more valuable, or even offer their talents for writing, like film or comedy or speeches, into something that’s more lucrative and also, you guessed it—something that requires less effort. Although publishers desperately want to establish these authors to build a lifetime of reliable sales, the number of bestselling books in a series not already ten, twenty or thirty books into its run was a grand total of seven from February 2022 to February 2023: (we’re not counting new series by an established bestselling series author, e.g., John Grisham, Lisa Gardner, James Patterson etc.):
Thriller
In the Blood by Jack Carr
The fifth book in the Terminal List series.
Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo
The second book in the Alex Stern series.
Science Fiction/Fantasy
The Atlas Paradox by Olivie Blake
The second book in the Atlas series.
The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik
The third book in the Scholomance series.
Moon Witch, Spider King by Marlon James
The second book in the Dark Star trilogy.
On the August 21, 2022 bestseller list, Black Dog takes the crown for longest running series to hit the list year-to-date. 62 books! 62!
Mystery
The Retreat by Sarah Pearse
The second book in the Detective Elin Warner series
The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman
The third book in the Thursday Murder Club series.
That’s a grand total of two mysteries in the entire year. A second and third book in the series, no less, so we’ll see if they continue to have staying power. Essentially, no new series are being created, but why is that if there’s a huge demand for series fiction and a desire for publishers to cement these reliable sales and readerships?
An educated guess is that mystery series are like sitcoms. The series and their authors that are still around year-after-year started a long time ago, thirty, in some cases forty years ago. It’s no surprise then that their readerships are also older. This demographic has their favorite series authors—and it can’t be understated that this market is massive—but these readers are not looking for something new: they like what they like and show up every year for it. So if older series readers aren’t interested in trying something new, then the second half of the equation is younger people: why isn’t there a new generation of readers making authors who will one day publish their 62nd book in a series that hits the list?
I believe this mirrors a much larger cultural shift that’s happening across arts and entertainment and it can be summarized like this: younger generations are now fans of players and not teams. This is an anecdotal but real phenomenon happening in sports with more regularity, as we’ve shifted from the early aughts where fans use to performatively burn jerseys of departing players to the current era of waxing rhapsodic about your favorite player you admire no matter where they go. This ethos extends itself to books or television or clothes—younger consumers basically want new and different things from the same person. Whereas older readers find comfort in consistency of character, younger readers more value consistency of style.
The reality is that many new series authors are being minted each year, but they don’t have a PI or intrepid detective at their center. The new series author write what we call “standalones,” books where the settings and characters don’t carryover. Also on the hardcover bestseller list you’ll see Exiles by Jane Harper new at #8 this week. This book is sneaky because it is by technical definition a series—it’s the third book that features her reoccurring Aaron Falk as its protagonist (so my methodology above isn’t perfect)—but it doesn’t say that in the description or on the book cover. It’s presented to the public as something entirely new if you were to just find it online, so that any reader that happens upon Exiles will not think it’s a continuous story they have to go back to catch up on. Many of the authors establishing a track of bestselling titles book-after-book are also, as a consequence, writing books outside of strict genre where series reside, a type of book that at its core is about reoccurring elements. Instead our serial bestselling authors are bleeding more and more consistently into the world of literary fiction. That doesn’t mean that younger generations are suddenly only interested in reading very serious literature, but it does explain that with the simultaneous decline of genre fiction we see a rise in popular literary fiction that uses genre—and the rise of the new term for the hybrid of genre and literary fiction, “upmarket” (above fluff, below strict seriousness). This is akin to the limited run series on television and the increasing use of anthology style series like Yellowstone, White Lotus, or You (which started based on two novels with a continuous series style story, but has now taken trips to LA and now London with totally new settings, characters and storylines that change radically outside of the leading man).
Business wise this shift is not great news for publishers or television or sports (well, the sports teams at least). Sitcoms, like a popular series, are cash machines. Netflix, which has become something else entirely as this whole shift has been happening, was initially built off of The Office. Publishing houses too are built, at their base, off of many long running series that keep the lights on. It’s a juggling act: sitcoms and series are still more valuable, more important, and more profitable, but they are also predictably declining, while the new way is undeniably replacing the old but is still far less profitable or valuable. What makes it not an easy switch, is that creating standalone books or limited series or superstar athletes is much more difficult in a macro sense and less reliable than writing a book in a series, filming a sitcom, or slapping a slightly different version of your logo on a jersey year after year. It takes far more effort and time to create something from scratch every time rather than build off of previous work, and the results are far less certain. The new model is gaining ground, but it may never reach the heights of the old.
Back Matter: Links and Other Happenings
The book that defined a generation is now a video game, with both controversy and record preorders (as these things seem to go). Best and worst Superbowl commercials? seems like a lot of variations on the same celebrity-stuffed theme. Interesting answers as to why a New York subway costs so much to build. I think the title of this article was supposed to be cute? There are a million Rihanna killed her Super Bowl halftime performance articles and it’s hard to disagree. Happy valentine’s day, give someone a book!
Yes indeed, Dear Head of Mine - Happy Valentine's Day from a Happy Reader!!gma❤️