Serendipity
I found myself falling through a blog hole over at Kristine Katheryn Rusch’s blog yesterday, going back and reading earlier posts she kept referencing. Along the way, I discovered a three-paragraph section that was immediately snagged for my thesis: Then there were the series that I had to abandon because of the changes in publishing. In the 1980s and early 1990s, book publishers loved series. More than that, they loved poaching series from another publisher. Publisher A couldn’t make your series work? Publisher B was happy to snatch up the next book—mid-series—and prove to Publisher A how stupid their marketing department was. But with the collapse of the distribution system in the late 1990s, the consolidation of publishing houses, and the layoff of countless employees, suddenly this poaching practice stopped. A series wasn’t doing as well as it could for Publisher A? Well, then no other publisher would touch it. A series was doing passably well for Publisher A? Then