Shop-Talk: Standalones, Trilogies, and Series

I guess it’s no secret that authors love series, and love them for practical reasons—the chance to more fully explore a world and a set of characters, and the fact that when an author sells a series to a publisher, there are multiple book sales involved. Much more comforting to one’s career than selling standalone books one at a time.
(Sure, if you’re Stephen King or Nora Roberts, you can just sell X number of unspecified books, but most authors can’t do that. There’s a process of...<![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]>