How long is too long between books?

I’m wrapping up the last bits of the first draft of the follow-up to Chasing Filthy Lucre. It’s been a long process, with stops and starts. I think I’ve written close to 40,000 words on one version that will never see the light of day. It’s good stuff, but not right for this book.

I never intended to go this long between books. I have all three of the remaining books loosely plotted. It’s just finding time to write them all that’s hard.

Anyway, I got to thinking about this the other day and wondered if I’d missed my window. Have I waited too long between books? Is any momentum I had built gone at this point? We are looking at a little more than a year between releases.

So I turned the question over to the people who follow my author page on Facebook. They gave me some great answers, but I’d love to hear from all of you here, too. Here’s the question. Answer in the comments. I’ll respond.

When reading a series, how quickly do you want the next book to come out? Assuming that immediately is not an answer, what's the right amount of time between installments?

What if that series is not a serial, meaning that the next book doesn't continue the story started in the book before it, but features a recurring main character?

Breaking the rules. Is it OK?

I recently finished reading Charlie Huston’s Caught Stealing. Great book.  It’s a rollercoaster ride that takes off on Page 1 and doesn’t stop. It’s brutal and profane, but it’s a ton of fun.  I loved the voice, and I loved the structure of the novel. It’s not written in long chapters, but shorter chunks. Sometimes they are only a few lines long. They really helped establish the book’s pace – which is rocket-like.

One thing you’ll notice reading the book, though, is the lack of quote marks. Instead, Huston uses dashes at the beginning of a line to indicate someone’s speaking. There are no dialogue tags either.

It was something I thought would bother me when I first started reading, but a page or two into it I was fine without the quotes. I did get me wondering, though, what others thought about this kind of rule bending.

How much are you willing to put up with something like creative punctuation in a novel? Does it bother you when an author breaks the rules?