A Problem to Wish For?

I'm still not back home yet, but hoping you'll be entertained by the posts and articles I've come across that I'm sharing with you while I'm gone. The one highlighted here, about the travails of being a wildly popular author who decides to cancel a series, was too good not to bring to you . . .


Do you have your copy of the recently released DEAD EVER AFTER, the last book in the Sookie Stackhouse series? Charlaine Harris, author of the wildly popular vampire series, has called it quits after all these years, and it appears that her fans are not only upset, but many are beyond furious.

It seems like this problem of Ms. Harris's is one we could all wish for: to have sold many millions of copies of our books and had HBO make a hugely successful television series (True Blood) based on them, but then have our fan base be horribly distraught when we finally end the series. But it goes beyond that.

Shortly after DEAD EVER AFTER came out, the Wall Street Journal published this fascinating article on the series and what Ms. Harris is facing from her angry fans.

Personally, I believe deep down that an author should be able to end a series when she or he needs to without being threatened or called awful names by fans, but I do know there's a greedy little part of my heart that is very glad that Arthur Conan Doyle caved to fan pressure and brought Sherlock Holmes back to life after Doyle had tired of the series and killed Holmes off in a battle to the death with his arch enemy Professor Moriarty. (I'm a bigtime mystery fan, but not so much one of vampires—mainly because they scare the bejeezus out of me—so I haven't gotten hooked on Sookie Stackhouse. But I can relate.)

So I'm torn, but I do come down on the side of the author, here. Where do you stand?