Can anyone tell me if this references an actual "real world" book series and, if so, the titles? -
"Time that I spent starting on the book that I'd bought in the W H Smith's branch in the duty-free section.
It was the story of a young man called Paul and his progression trough teen angst, University and adulthood. The book I had was the first volume in a proposed six book series, by some guy who, from his name I assumed was Italian, although the books were going to be set in America."
Sounds like it was referencing Summer camp by nick scipio, thought that was like 3 or 4 books once upon a time.
I now have permission to post the rest of the Summer Camp Swingers Christy series on Bookapy. So... sometime in the next month or so they'll be available there.
I grew to dislike SUMMER CAMP. The story begins with the main character getting a phone call where he is told of a death. He sits down and begins to "remember" his past. At this time he is married and has children. The mystery is that who died and who is his wife is not revealed and remains a mystery long after he stopped posting on SOL and his final books were on Amazon Kindle. Once he moved his stories to his own site I quit reading (although I did buy the last book just to get the answer to the mystery which I would reveal here.)
I also found I disliked the series. The MC (I could add the the Ordinary Sex Life and Stupid Boy series) are just cardboard cutouts with cocks. Thousands of pages of nothing more than boy meeting girl and fucking her gets boring. Even the "conflicts" among the characters have no tension.
All of these might have been interesting if kept to a reasonable length.
Ironically, the longer the series, the more popular it is.
Thhose who don't like a series are less likely to read the later stories in the series, leaving only the hard-core fans to vote on the later ones.
There is a bit of that, and I have seen it myself.
I have a series of 19 that all link together. The first in that series has over 300k reads, the third and last of the core series has over 100k reads. Most of the rest are short stories, with various numbers of reads. But the forth long form in the series has over 72k reads.
But there are some that prefer to see multiple stories, as they can pick up already knowing the characters or setting, and not need to learn all of that each time they read a new installment.
This is a case where "size doesn't matter, it's how you use it."
In the series I mentioned, you can pick up any part of the series and not have missed anything. The characters don't evolve. I do understand that some people like soap operas for the same reason.
Hmm. I'm not sure I agree with you about some of your examples, but it's not worth arguing about.
Given the topic drift, I'm going to start a new thread on long series.
The MC (I could add the the Ordinary Sex Life and Stupid Boy series) are just cardboard cutouts with cocks.
Plus several books in he became rather abusive and an asshole. When he pretty much raped a girl I threw up my hands and called it quits.
It's one thing when you are setting up an anti-hero, but he was supposed to be a "good guy". And at that point I lost most of my respect for the character and story. Plus it had largely devolved from "coming of age" to "entire family incest orgies", which really does not interest me.
