The Never Ending Series

Image found here.

A few years ago a friend of mine gave me a book for my birthday, the first in a series that she had been loving recently. When I read it a little while later, I was hooked. I immediately requested the next three books in the series, and read them all within a week, forcing me to request the next few books. Even at that point, six books in, I was still loving the series and wanting more. When the next book in the series came out, I pre-ordered it, thinking it was the last book in the series. Read it. It still wasn't over. That was two years ago. The series is still not completely written.

Now I'm not pointing fingers or even going to mention that particular series. I still remember a lot of what happened in the eight books I did read in that particular series, and I still remember loving those books all these years later. Since then one books has been released, I haven't read it and I don't think I will ever finish the story. This is what I like to call the never ending series. Perfectly gripping, interesting, amazing stories being held out too long just for the sake of having another book to put on a bookstore shelf.

Image found here.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves in books today. You can barely even read a book from the Young Adult category without a series tagged on, and stand alone books are hard to come by. This bugs me because it's very obvious that it's just a way to get more books out and to get more money. It would make me really happy if writers would write until they think the book is perfect, not pull it out five books more than it needs to be. I wish publishers would realize how wanting books in series makes a reader less likely to continue, and it wastes a lot of people's time with worthless extra stuff.

Edit: In the comments a good point has come to my attention. Long series like this can also be good for some readers, especially readers who have trouble finding books that they enjoy. If a readers, specifically a young reader, finds a book that they really enjoy, it would  be beneficial for that book to be part of a series because they would then be encouraged to read more, and hopefully encourage them to be lifelong readers.

I would like to clarify that this is not an attack on stories being more than one book long. If there is enough to say for the entire series to be one thousand pages long, please, by all means do what you need to do to put that story into bit sized pieces. A good example is Harry Potter. Those books were meant to book the way they are, seven of them. But that is not always the case.What do you think? Have you had this issue before?