When Do You Give Up on an Idea?

On Friday, the sequel to Save the Pearls: Revealing Eden called Save the Pearls: Adapting Eden came out. I can't yet get a copy for review but hopefully will be able to get hands on one soon (back order) because I'd really like to read it for a review.

Still figuring the availability thing and/or borrowing it thing out.

Anyway, I think it's no secret how much I loathed the whole debacle that was the original novel and this trilogy as a whole. I won't rehash everything here---couldn't do it all based on how many sides there were---but basically for the uninitiated this series was a miscalculated exploration of race. It used the idea of a great global warming event called the Heat to create a topsy-turvy world where the darker your skin, the more power you had (basically cause melanin now protects you from the UV radiation as we all know black people are Superman and impervious to radiation somehow). Anyway, in the middle of this insipid mess is a girl named Eden who makes Bella Swan look deep and who also is searching for love in all furry places with a transformed tycoon named Bramford, a literal black beastman.

You can see how it's problematic, even if the author felt that she was treating race with sensitivity or not, the end result backfired and badly. It ended up also dragging down Weird Tales's reputation with it.

All in all a big mess and, by Foyt (the author's) own admission on a radio interview it was not a big success commercially. Now Book 2, available for months on pre-order is at 6.5 millionth place on Amazon and it all makes me wonder, the wretchedness of StP as a "franchise" aside, when do authors give up and go onto a new project. Sometimes, as the movie Mean Girls points out "that is never going to be a thing."  Well, "fetch" was never a popular word and StP is just NOT the next "Hunger Games" no matter how hard it tries.

But don't we all have trunk novels or even as independently published authors, ideas that never caught on with readers even if we thought they were solid work. I don't feel that way yet with my first effort, but as I grow with two new books in ToC out this year and also a second series I hope to debut in October, I am trying to brace myself for what happens in January of 2014.

Will I be re-evaluating continuing with one series?

Will one be overshadowing the other?

Will neither do as well as I hope and I end up trying a third while keeping them up as well?

Just, when as a writer do you know the difference between trying hard and having faith to succeed and flogging something that just was never going to work.

I know I don't know. I do know that StP isn't ever going to be a NY Times best seller, but I don't know how to realize in myself when I, too, am tilting at windmills...