The Rothfuss Effect

It's Real, It Exists, and there's no getting away from it.

I am, unfortunately, quite familiar with this effect. It has a name, because simply put, it didn't exist before Patrick Rothfuss, who made a lot of money, and fucked over an entire industry, at the same time.

The first time it happened to me was a little less than a decade ago when the effect was in full swing and I was a new author. I wrote a trilogy, or rather was writing one. I was planning a 6 to 8 month gap between books - something which you can not do as an indy author now. If that's your plan, save yourself the grief and don't bother writing the books. Or wait until you've written them all. Because the readers will punish you.

Don't laugh, Larry Correia has written blog posts on this effect and how much it sucks. Here's what happened to me:

I release Book 1 - it did really well. Really well. Book 2's sales sucked. They weren't even ten percent of Book 1. I couldn't figure it out until I managed to poll some of the readers and went and saw a fair number of Book 1's reviews, many of which said:

I would not have bought book 1 if I had know this was a trilogy. I no longer buy trilogies until the last book is published.

Several reviews even mentioned Mr. Rothfuss by name. Who, until then, I'd never heard of. Yup, that asshole fucked over literally hundreds of authors and an entire industry.

My response, after much swearing, was to write Book 3 immediately. It was thirty thousand words shorter that I'd originally planned - but I had to get it out there ASAP because I needed to do something. But it was too late - the damage, as they say, was done. The trilogy tanked. I stopped numbering books for the next 5 years and didn't give any indications as to how many there would be. I also focused more on one thing at a time.

The hardest part was telling everyone that there would be no more books in that world. Because even though I'd put out Book 3, it was too late. Those who said what they had after Book 1 never came back (the bastards). It didn't matter that it was finished; they'd forgotten and moved on. Understand that the people who go by the Rothfuss effect never come back. NEVER. Everyone else sees Book 1 getting lots of reviews, but Book 2 and Book 3 getting barely nothing - so they immediately know that it all sucks and they don't buy it.

That's the halo effect of the Rothfuss effect - the double whammy.

And you can talk to these people until you are blue in the face, they do not care, they have chosen their hill, and they will die on it. I know, I've tried. A certain famous author who wrote a series with the same name as a famous German city that got firebombed during WW2 is currently experiencing this with a different series of theirs.

So, back in 2023 I decided to try and start writing in a new genre. New because I was going to take two extent genres and try to combine them, and see how it went. I had planned for a book every three months. I released BK1 10/23. But then the unexpected happened. I got a book back for another series that I was going to be contracted on from a major publisher. They no longer wanted it. I'd invested time and money into that so rather than toss it. I got a cover and published it. I figured I could bounce back and forth between the two.

Well, wrong. That series took off. Which was great. But I had some contractual obligations (plus a whole bunch of unexpected non-writing stuff interrupted my life in 2024) so that 'new' book - which did okay and if I'd been able to stick to my original plans would have done better - didn't get a sequel until 11 months later.

I honestly should not have bothered.

While it got good reviews, it's sold only about 1000 copies. I waited too long and in indy, a long wait tells everyone that there isn't going to be another book, so no matter how much they liked the first one, they're not buying anymore. That's where the 'Rothfuss' effect is now. I obviously scammed them. So they'll punish me by not buying it.

Well that's fine. I knew this coming in. I'd hoped to get back on track with this new series (I'd planned for 6 total). I'd hoped maybe to dodge this bullet as I have a fair number of fans and have been doing this for a while.

Well, no such luck, I'm not immune. It's dead and it won't come back to life. In indy, dead series never come back to life - as a rule, indy fans don't read stuff that's more than a year old, (no I don't make the rules, that's just the way it is).

But this leaves me with a rotting corpse and wondering what to do with it? Ideally I'd unpublish both books, remove any and all mention from my website, and pretend it never happened. There are folks who will say 'but it's making 10 or 20 bucks a month! Just leave it there!'

Yeah, no. Because people will bug the hell out of you for more books, and it's financially disastrous to write a book that only a couple hundred (if that) people will buy. And if they're all buying it via KU it's even worse financially. So what I should do is memory hole the project. Because I'm going to be spending the next three years telling people that it's not worth writing and then listening to them get all pissy at me.

But here's the problem: The Audiobook. I have a contract on the series on the audiobooks. I shipped it off to the company I'm under contract with, immediately. The audiobook comes out very soon. Now, maybe I should have told them to kill it, stop work on it, don't release it, the series is dead! But I didn't know then, what I know now.

There's also always that chance that the audiobook will do really really well (yeah, right!) and I'd continue the series as an audiobook only one. I mean, it could happen, right? (insert butt monkey joke here).

So I'm sitting here quite frustrated. Now, I -think- I could kickstarter the next book. I'm currently doing that with two different series, doing a 'last book' because sales tapered off, but there was enough hew and cry to give it a go. And all it takes is about 250 people to fund one. But do you really want to write books that only 250 people are going to read?

I don't. I'm doing it in these two cases because they're the last books and they're wrapping up final events in a story line. In one case Covid kept the last book from being written, in the other the series had just gotten long in the tooth (30 books total). So over time, they'll probably get more than just 250 readers.

So, my typical course of action, what I should do, is pull the two books down and pretend they never happened. Less stress and drama. But I can't because I don't want to screw over the audiobook folks. In that very slim chance that it'll make them money.

But it all circles back to the Rothfuss effect. I waited too long. Once upon a time, prior to Mr. Rothfuss, people were fine with books taking a year, sometimes longer, to come out. Sadly that ship has sailed. In anything that is at all fantasy like, and any related genre, the effect is still in force. Especially in the world of self-publishing (indy). It's sad that the fans all feel this way, that they've decided to punish every other author for the sins of one. But they have, and that's the landscape on which we find ourselves now.

I can't really blame Rothfuss either, anymore, as much as it might be tempting to do so - because I knew the rules walking into this. So the fault solely lies with me. I should not have written BK2, I should not have wasted my time, few people were asking for it. I would not be in this position now if I had not. No author likes putting one of their works in an unmarked grave. But you learn over time, that sometimes, it's really for the best.

Oh, and for those of you who wonder what authors dream of at night?

Welcome to my nightmare.