In recentish times I’ve talked about my top 10 standalone fantasy novels, why series novels should not pretend to be standalone fantasy novels, and the kind of standalone fantasy novel that’s really a stealthy series.

There’s one kind of fantasy novel I haven’t discussed in any depth, and it’s the fantasy format which is most iconic as well as the most vilified. It also, apparently, sells better than any other fantasy format.

I’m talking about the trilogy.

The trilogy gets a bad rap, mostly from people who don’t read fantasy novels. It’s the equivalent of Fabio book covers – the feature of the genre most fixated on by outsiders. In truth, fantasy trilogies are popular for many good reasons. They are long enough that you can tell a really epic story and build up a thoroughly detailed world, but not so long that people start worrying about the author’s life expectancy.

According to publishing legend, the format came about when the hardback of a moderately successful novel by some chap called Tolkien proved too long to publish in a single paperback edition. It was broken up into three paperbacks, and promptly became a zeitgeist-making, record-smashing, hugely popular book of a generation, and then another generation, inspiring publishers to actively hunt “something a bit like it”. While many of the immediate successors to Tolkien did not in fact write trilogies, ultimately the popularity of this format is laid at his door.

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I had a great chat tonight on Twitter with @JonathanStrahan, @charliejane, @charlesatan and others about fantasy and the way that publishers are reacting in different ways to the reader resistance phenomenon: readers turning their back on extended fantasy series, and in some cases refusing to start reading a series until it’s complete, so that they can happily get invested in the characters without worrying the author is going to drop dead, or make them wait.

Some of the techniques publishers are using include letting the author finish the whole series/trilogy so they can assure readers it’s all going to be there, and in many cases releasing the books much closer together, rather than the more traditional one volume a year. This is happening with my Creature Court trilogy, where the third book will be delivered around the time the first will be published, and they’ll be coming out six monthly. Meanwhile, Rowena Cory Daniells has a new trilogy coming out this year through Solaris at once a month! As Jonathan pointed out, this is a method the romance industry has been employing for years.

I get pretty angry about the most problematic method publishers use to overcome the reader resistence phenomenon: that is to say, fraud.

I still remember the fury I felt when I got to the end of Gwyneth Jones’ Bold as Love. There was no sign on the book that it was a continuous series, but ten pages from the end, I had suspected there was a lack of finality. Sure enough, “to be continued in Castles in the Sand.” There are other examples, quite a few of them documented across the web, of series which the publishers have, for whatever reason, chosen not to represent as a series from Book #1.

Here’s the thing: there are many things you can do to try to persuade readers that is going to be worth their while to pick up Book #1. But it’s not okay to pretend the book is something other than what it is. A reader who doesn’t want to read a lone Book #1 is going to be PARTICULARLY angry if they are tricked into buying a book under false pretences. They will tell their friends. And you know, if they don’t (as most readers don’t) know much about the industry and how it works, they’re not going to blame the publisher. They’re going to blame the author.

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