It's partly the artist to blame, and partly the audience. The first book/album is the culmination of possibly years of creative percolating. After that, it's time to just get the next product in the assembly line out, and it's likely to be a letdown.
Why is the audience to blame? Well, in some ways the expectation of something just as amazing as the first installment is impossible to meet. The consumer is not privy to the long history that first work had prior to its release, and can't fully accept that the sequel is simply not going to have the same creative weight behind it.
But let's face it: it's mostly on us. The writer, the musician, the movie director. If we experience the old Sophomore Slump it's because we haven't put the work in that we needed to.
Yeah, it's difficult. You want any second installment to be the same, but different. In exactly the right ratio.
It's very easy to make the second book too similar to the first. I call this the "Chamber of Secrets" effect. An installment that serves only to reinforce what the author intends to be the "pattern" of the series, and not to add anything artistically new to the pot. It has a purpose - to say "this is what the series is" - but to the reader this is merely dead space.
And yet, going the other way is even worse. When the second book is too different to the first, the series loses all cohesion and you lose all of the readers who wanted more of the kind of thing they liked so much about that initial book.
There's a line there. A very narrow, fuzzy, hard-to-find line. And that's where I'm walking right now, plotting and inventing, trying my darndest to pull the story of Book 2 out of the mire of swirling possibilities it exists in currently.
If you fail at the second lap, you've lost the race. This is no time to get complacent. This, right here, this is the biggest challenge. And I have to be ready for it.
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