Welcome to the economics of scifi/fantasy publishing. It's really hard to get people to start reading a book set in an entirely new world, but if you succeed on

Welcome to the economics of scifi/fantasy publishing. It's really hard to get people to start reading a book set in an entirely new world, but if you succeed once and they like the book, they are very likely to purchase new books in the same setting. This is why all genre books are parts of trilogies, most of which get abandoned after the first or second book, (because the market just wasn't there, and the publisher just didn't want any more books after a flop), or which get extended well past any desire from the author or good sense simply because people keep purchasing them, the author needs to pay their mortgage and their new books not set in the established universe keep flopping. I think Stross went into this at length at a panel in some con I was in.