Sunk Cost Fallacy and Fantasy Books?
First Published some time in 2022 by Emmett Borg
I was big into the fantasy genre. Swords and lasers, witches and wizards. Fantasy authors love to structure their work into a Series. Some in a modest trilogy, or a moderate pentalogy (A Song of Ice and Fire). But others may get carried away... such as 14 books for Wheel of Time, or 41 for Discworld.
What do you do when you are thousands of pages deep into a series, multiple books behind you, but just aren't feeling it anymore? Do you justify continuing, or cut your losses? I scraped book series ratings for 30 top fantasy series' list on goodreads.com to find out.
The number of user ratings gives us an idea of how many people read each book in a series. As expected, we see a big drop-off between book 1 and 2. You gave it a shot, but aren't ready to commit further down the series. For example there are 8.2 million ratings for the first Harry Potter novel, but "only" 3.2 million for the sequel. That's a 61% drop!
This data was pulled on 2022-01-12 for 218 novels with over 76 million ratings. Some manual cleaning was required as goodreads may already have ratings for an unreleased book (e.g. Winds of Winter, an unreleased book, had 9 thousand ratings)
Magic Number 4?
On the left I've included examples of a few top series', on the right I've aggregated across all 30.
It appears the dropoff in readership from book 1 to 4 is steep. All of the sudden though, things start to steady out and don't decrease much. It seems like if a reader gets 4 books deep, they just keep on going to the bitter end!
Stats by Series
| Series | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Harry Potter | 100% | 39% | 40% | 36% | 35% | 34% | 39% | |||
| The Lord Of The Rings | 100% | 32% | 30% | |||||||
| A Song Of Ice And Fire | 100% | 38% | 32% | 31% | 27% | |||||
| The Kingkiller Chronicle | 100% | 59% | ||||||||
| The Chronicles Of Narnia Publication Order | 100% | 16% | 18% | 11% | 13% | 19% | 10% | |||
| Percy Jackson And The Olympians | 100% | 38% | 35% | 37% | 34% | |||||
| The Mistborn Saga | 100% | 70% | 65% | 33% | 21% | 19% | ||||
| The Wheel Of Time | 100% | 58% | 53% | 43% | 35% | 32% | 31% | 27% | 26% | 23% |
| His Dark Materials | 100% | 29% | 24% | |||||||
| The Stormlight Archive | 100% | 68% | 46% | 20% | ||||||
| The Inheritance Cycle | 100% | 25% | 21% | 16% | ||||||
| The Farseer Trilogy | 100% | 63% | 50% | |||||||
| The Mortal Instruments | 100% | 47% | 49% | 30% | 27% | 19% | ||||
| The Dark Tower | 100% | 43% | 37% | 33% | 31% | 27% | 29% | |||
| Discworld | 100% | 40% | 47% | 63% | 26% | 30% | 23% | 53% | 20% | 22% |
| Sword Of Truth | 100% | 46% | 32% | 34% | 28% | 30% | 25% | 23% | 22% | 18% |
| The Belgariad | 100% | 70% | 89% | 74% | 90% | |||||
| Artemis Fowl | 100% | 29% | 25% | 26% | 29% | 16% | 10% | 10% | ||
| Night Angel | 100% | 62% | 60% | |||||||
| The Dresden Files | 100% | 56% | 47% | 43% | 40% | 38% | 37% | 35% | 35% | 31% |
| Gentleman Bastard | 100% | 49% | 37% | |||||||
| Earthsea Cycle | 100% | 37% | 38% | 16% | 8% | 8% | ||||
| The First Law | 100% | 70% | 66% | 39% | 25% | 21% | ||||
| The Old Kingdom | 100% | 58% | 61% | 12% | 7% | 1% | ||||
| Inkworld | 100% | 31% | 21% | |||||||
| Malazan Book Of The Fallen | 100% | 64% | 48% | 40% | 34% | 33% | 28% | 27% | 24% | 24% |
| Dragonriders Of Pern | 100% | 38% | 34% | |||||||
| Avalon | 100% | 9% | 8% | 8% | 12% | 1% | 1% | |||
| Bartimaeus | 100% | 72% | 64% | |||||||
| The Original Shannara Trilogy | 100% | 76% | 58% |