How many books should a fantasy book series have?

Skye (no day but today <3): How many books should a fantasy book series have?
I am 13 and trying to write a fantasy series (because i greatly admire J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer) and i am almost finished with my first book. I was wondering how many words it should end up with and how many books should follow it. Help?

Answers and Views:

Answer by Sakura
At least four to count as a series.

Answer by “Moments of a Demigod”
You need four books or more for a series and three if you want a trilogy.

Answer by Panama Joe
Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote 35 Tarzan stories. Or was it 36?

https://www.tarzan.org/

Answer by IsabelleLovee 😉
I would say at least 3, no more than six! You don’t want it to drag on, but you want something for your readers to look forward to! And kudos for you on writing a book at 13! 🙂 I’m in the middle of mine, trying to figure out my plot! Good luck!

Answer by J.
If you want a good or successful series each book has to be 500-100 pages at least and preferable 5-10 books. I read constantly and when a series doesn’t meet those requirements it makes me mad.

Answer by steve h
Michael Moorcock has written well over 50 books in his Eternal Champion cycle.

Answer by Steven J Pemberton
A series should have as many books as are necessary to tell the story, and no more. Novels for adults average around 100,000 words, but fantasy can be a bit longer. Novels for teenagers are shorter – around 60,000 words, I think.

Tarzan and the Eternal Champion both have a lot of books in the series, but they don’t tell one single continuing story – you can read some of the later books without needing to read all the earlier ones first.

Answer by Lord Infamous ♥ Penguins ¤FC¤
you should really find another author to admire instead of stephanie meyer…

five is a good number

Answer by Fittings Doc
It all depends on the length of the story YOU have to tell, and the number of books needed to tell it.
Let the story you have to tell, and the reasonable points to separate the books, determine the actual length. From my experience, whenever a writer has FORCED the story to be stretched to more books, say to form a trilogy, or worse shortened a story line to fit within a trilogy, or broke at an illogical point in the story because it fit the publishers desired book length, the story suffers so badly that the reader is not happy with the result.

Many of the famous series, are trilogies or series, that lead to follow up story lines that created new trilogies or series involving the same characters (or tangential characters from the original story), or occur in the same “world”, or occur in the same world but at a different point in the time line. (See Raymond E. Feist’s “The Riftwar Saga” (3 books), etc. and David Eddings’ “Belgariad” (5 books), etc as examples)

Some series occur simply from a single book, that generates a sequel, and then another, and so on to meet readers demand.

The “Lord of the Rings” trilogy grew out of the world and characters first created in “The Hobbit”.