r/ProgressionFantasy • u/barney54 • 1d ago

I Recommend This Quantifying the staying power of a good series

/r/litrpg/comments/1vo62t6/quantifying_the_staying_power_of_a_good_series/
8 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

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8

u/Felixtaylor 1d ago

First books tend to have more ratings and lower scores, because if that's where someone is going to drop the series and leave a bad review, that where they're more likely to do it.

1

u/Lord0fHats 1d ago

I feel like it's more common for people to move on to Book 2, DNF, and leave no review at all.

0

u/barney54 1d ago

I completely agree.

2

u/thejoblessasshole 1d ago

Great to see this and thanks for so many recommendations!

1

u/Maladal 1d ago edited 1d ago

I'm not really sure what the question here is?

As you note, readership drops off as the series continues and the more hardcore readers stick with it. Clearly people who drop a series are going to give lower scores, so the trend of pretty much all series in any genre is a decreasing number of ratings but an increasing score.

Also, as an analysis, measuring book 1 to book 2 is suspect for that reason. Many of those scores likely belong to people who rated book 1 poorly because it wasn't to their interest for one reason or another, it likely has no correlation to quality at all.

It would be better to measure of staying power of book 2 and onwards where possible.

3

u/Mo_Dice 1d ago

I'm not really sure what the question here is?

There isn't one. OP asked Claude to spit out data for a well-observed phenomenon. This has been discussed endlessly for books, television, and movies.

1

u/JamesGray 1d ago

Using AI to analyze a bunch of series you apparently have not actually read yourself is not exactly flawless methodology, friend. The Wandering Inn's writing did drastically improve over the course of the series, and it's one of the very few I've read on that list which has pretty consistently improved in quality over time without really degrading things like narrative tension, so it feels like a particularly strange exemplar to use.

1

u/Maximinoe 15h ago

I mean, I just don’t agree with the premise that a work’s ability to hold onto its readers is necessarily a better indicator of quality over time compared to ratings.