I'm honestly a bit upset writing this, but does anyone else feel like PB is in a major rut right now? All they seem to churn out now is romance books, and the books that are not primarily romance have great premises and potential but then turn out to be very underwhelming.
- contains mild spoilers*
Some complaints I have had
- The major flop that The Junior was. My gosh, this was so bad imo. It didn't have anything that made people like the books in it - no just fun scenes, character development, relationship building, and you couldn't even tell the MC was in college! She didn't really do any college stuff and we didn't get any of that fun stuff. It's a book about college kids and there were no classes, parties, hanging out, etc. Major ugh.
- Hero and MW MIA. Okay, I get PB has a lot to write so there could have been a delay for these books, that's fine. But both are going on years being off and we've gotten no news regarding their fate. They keep telling us they're busy working on it, and I know it takes time, but not this long. And sure, they have other stories they like to write and ongoing stories, but they seem to churn out a new book every month or so. And when they have the time to do that they could easily give us short 6-8 chapter wrapup books for these two. Now, if they come back, nobody will care about them or remember what happened in the last book. It's almost like when a TV channel keeps a show off the air for a few years, by the time the show comes back on air, all the viewers have forgotten about it. And this is really annoying when these two books are in your all time favorite books from PB.
- Romance romance romance. Ok, I know romance probably does well for PB so they want to cater to that audience, but really, they could try a little harder to make the plotlines not so romance based. For instance, back in the golden era, ROE, ES, TC&TF, these all had romance in them, but were not 100% made for relationships, and these were some of PB's most popular books! They can make books that aren't totally romance based and have hits. Nearly all the new books getting churned out are romance based - AME, D&D, and soon to be BSC (the tagline is literally "a cowboy comes walking up"!)
- Lagging plotlines. PB has a lot of good ideas, they do, but I find they must truly rush through the books that aren't romance based as I find halfway through the books, they often get boring and underwhelming. ES' final book I felt was so underwhelming at times, VOS has lagged at points, Bloodbound was pretty simple, RCD puts me to sleep, and PM, while not bad, has been quite predictable at times (the LI being a robot)
- Timing issues. ES' final book had like 10 breaks, and one would expect they would have had a long book they were planning out, and then the book ended up being really short and underwhelming. They needed several breaks to finish a rather short book? And then Hero and MW anyone? I remember reading them when computers didn't exist (sarcasm). ITLITW has been gone almost all year (maybe they wanted a Halloween theme, i guess), HSS has been gone on a pointless reboot for months now, TS has taken a while and usually they churn those out quickly (hopefully that's a good thing) . Point is they seem to be having these long delays in between and during these delays they are churning out new book after book- it seems they want to write new books rather than the old established books.
I really and truly hope PB is just in a rut right now due to being really busy and things work out better for us fans in the coming months, and I apologize for venting, but I just wanted to share my thoughts. These are simply just my opinions :)