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Simply put, I've been noticing a general truth in bookstores: Nearly every new book on the shelf is part of a series - this is doubly true in the Fantasy and Sci-Fi genres, but no less true in others.
As a writer with no ambitions to write series and preferring to focus on one-shot works, does one still stand a chance in the world of modern publishing?
In the SF and fantasy genres, there has been a clear market trend over about the last 30 years toward both longer books and series. You can see this pretty clearly if you walk into a bricks-and-mortar used book store. Short standalone books are common only up until about the 1970s.
One reason for the change in length may be because of the gradual slide of the magazines into irrelevance. E.g., when Robert Heinlein was at the top of his form ca. 1965-1970, he would publish his best work first as a serialized novel in a magazine, and then as a book. That only works for books up to a certain length.
Robert Sawyer is an unusual example of a successful SF novelist working today who publishes mostly relatively short standalone books. Several of his novels, including some standalones and some of the first installments of his trilogies, were originally serialized in Analog. Sawyer's example shows that it is still possible to sell standalone SF novels. His first novel was a standalone.
It's hard to say whether the trend toward series is an evil moneygrubbing thing by the publishers. It may be partly that, but I suspect there are also a lot of genre readers who actually enjoy reading series. (I'm not one of them.) The trend toward greater lengths would seem easier to explain as arising from the preferences of most readers. I don't see the commercial advantage to a publisher in selling a thicker book rather than a thinner book.
I think you are looking in the wrong part of the bookstore. Certainly that is not true in general fiction (by far the largest part of the fiction marketplace). There are plenty of best selling authors who do not write series. John Grisham is a good example, or Michael Crichton.
It also depends on how you define series. There are a number of novelists who write independent works featuring the same characters, but with no other real continuity between one story and the next.
I just took a look at the latest NYT bestseller list and more than half the entries are clearly not series, while several of the others appear to be series only in the weakest sense of featuring the same characters as previous books, not as continuing an ongoing story.
Like Hollywood, the publishing industry prefers known winners to unknown qualities. If you are successful with a series, odds are good you could get a standalone. But that is something to discuss with an editor.
Series basically comes down to one main goal... money! It is also easier to write because they don't have to spend time creating a new world and new (well completely new) character sets and can just pick up where they left off. Even if the stories are unrelated, a large part of the work is world setting and character creation. Everything these days is about mass production and how fast you can release content. A series pretty much nails both.
For fantasy, that's just the way things go though. People want to read an epic adventure and not part ways with their favorite characters. That being said though, you can argue that The Hobbit does exactly as you are looking for. It tells of an epic story in a singular stand alone book that is unrelated to a series. Lord of the Rings series you can argue is a continuation from The Hobbit, however you can read both separate from each other without issue.
I would imagine that publishers generally want to know what your future plans are with stories. Everything these days wants to be turned into a franchise. Movies, Books, Shows, Clothing, Toys, Video Games, you name it they will try to ride the tails of your successful book. The more content you release for that story, the more they can in turn sell and market. That is also though how you would make your money as you only get something like a dollar per book sold after all is said and done. The more content and royalties you can hand out, the more you make off of your story too.
In the end, whether you have a series or a singular story, what matters is the content. You aren't going to sell a series if book one flops no more so than you won't sell a singular book if it flops. There is nothing wrong with writing non serialized stories! Just be prepared that you may get some fan mail demanding for you to continue the book with a new story so that they can see what other shenanigans your MC gets into. Quality over quantity will always prevail. There is only so many books to a series, movies to a series, shows to a series, that someone can write before it becomes stale and riding the wave of success as it's only driving force.
