Tough Act To Follow / Literature

• Ender's Game was Orson Scott Card's first novel, which received major critical accolades and has sold millions of copies. His later novels, including a number of sequels, have been successful as genre fiction, but never broke out into mainstream acceptance as Ender's Game did.
• This trope is most likely the reason Harper Lee took over half a century to publish anything after To Kill a Mockingbird. She eventually published Go Set a Watchman, a book she wrote before To Kill a Mockingbird.
• The Great Gatsby: In universe. Tom Buchanan's football career peaked at 21 years old, making "everything afterwards seem like anticlimax."
• Robinson Crusoe is one of the most famous books in the history of mankind. Its sequel, The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, much less so. The third book about Robinson, Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, has even fewer readers since it's not even an adventure story, but a sort of essay collection.
• The idea that everyone has a moment which overshadows the rest of their life becomes a major theme of the novel Foucault's Pendulum.
• William Golding's first novel was Lord of the Flies. He wrote many others afterwards, but none of them matched its success.
• The success of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz haunted L. Frank Baum for the rest of his career. Although he tried to make forays into other stories, he was never very successful and ended up penniless, forced to write more Oz books. In the intro to one book he actually says that he knows many stories not about Oz, and wishes he had a chance to tell them. He used the fifth book of the series, The Road to Oz, as a sort of Massive Multiplayer Crossover by inviting characters from his other books to attend Princess Ozma's birthday party, hoping to get his Oz readers interested in those other stories. He even tried to end the series after the sixth book, The Emerald City of Oz, neatly tying up the loose ends, giving an in-universe explanation for the end of the stories, and announcing at the end that it would be the last Oz book. It didn't work, and he ended up writing eight more Oz books after that.
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle could never escape the popularity of his flagship series about a certain 19th century detective. Despite Doyle's attempts to move on by killing off the iconic protagonist, he later bowed to public pressure to bring him back. Also, like Frank Baum, Doyle got fed up with having to continue the series, but financial necessity and failed outside novels prevented him from branching out.
• Frankenstein: Mary Shelley once said something to the effect that: "some people only have one really good novel in them." She would probably know a little about this trope, given that most people can only name one thing she ever wrote, even though she went on to write The Last Man, which is remembered as the first post-apocalyptic-future novel, as well as other works.
• Peter S. Beagle unintentionally displayed the upside of this trope in an introduction to one edition of The Last Unicorn. He stated that the book would always haunt him "even as The Crock Of Gold came to haunt James Stephens." Notice that Stephens and The Crock of Gold don't have entries on the wiki — but The Last Unicorn does, and Beagle got a stub primarily because of it.
• Watership Down was Richard Adams' first novel. He wrote several others, but none of them became nearly as successful.
• Similarly, Joseph Heller never again came close to the success of The Great American Novel, Catch-22. Some of his later works playfully reference this including Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, which is even about an elderly novelist struggling to come up with a book as well-received as his famous magnum opus. Did you know that there's a sequel?
  "When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as Catch-22 I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'"
• Chuck Palahniuk exploded onto the scene with Fight Club, which became a major success after the highly popular and influential film adaptation. While his other novels sell well, none of them have come close to the success of Fight Club. His other novels usually advertise the fact that they are written "by the author of Fight Club", and reviews typically describe his work in relation to it.
• Walter Miller Jr. After publishing his masterpiece A Canticle for Leibowitz, Miller isolated himself for 40 odd years and never published another book again, only stating in an interview that his reasons for not publishing were "not for the public to know." The posthumously published follow-up to Canticle, "Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman," is universally regarded as inferior.
• Andrzej Sapkowski, writer of The Witcher saga, has published a few other books in his native Poland after the last volume of the series, but cannot top its popularity. In fact, his last book is hated by many for being too different from The Witcher.
• Amy Tan admits in her memoirs that she felt a lot of this after the runaway success of The Joy Luck Club. Her eventual solution was to write many novels until she came up with The Kitchen God's Wife, which she thought could stand on its own. In the end, she thinks it's better than The Joy Luck Club.
• Stephenie Meyer had a huge hit with The Twilight Saga. Her next novel, The Host (2008) sold very well and was also made into a movie, but has nowhere near the same level of hype. She has stated she has many other ideas for novels, so it remains to be seen if anything she does will come close to her first.
• Japanese author Koushun Takami has not written another novel since Battle Royale. After the original book received much international acclaim, and a film and manga adaptation a mere year after its 1999 release, not to mention renewed international interest thanks to the latter-day popularity of the very similar Hunger Games series, it's not hard to see why.
• Frank Stockton's "His Wife's Deceased Sister" had fun with this idea. A struggling author writes a tragic short story with the aforementioned title, which is published to universal acclaim; but to his horror finds that no one will even consider publishing any of his subsequent works, none of them being considered even half as good as HWDS. In the end he is forced to write under a false name in order to make a living at all. Stockton would be rather familiar with this situation, as he is far better recognized as the author of The Lady Or The Tiger.
• J. K. Rowling wrote the Harry Potter series, which became a cultural phenomenon and has earned over 10 billion dollars, not including book sales. She's acknowledged that nothing else she writes is remotely likely to approach that. However, she has proven herself not to be a one-hit wonder, given her non-Potter follow-ups have all been critically acclaimed best-sellers, although not to the same extent as Potter.
• A Song of Ice and Fire has A Storm of Swords. A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons were both well received but considered somewhat disappointing by comparison, having the dubious honors of following Swords which had so many game-changing plot developments and deaths that it was essentially a 1000+ page Wham Episode. The two that followed were essentially there to depict the aftermath of these events.
• The Thrawn Trilogy: No other post-Endor Star Wars story, both in Star Wars Legends and in Disney canon, has matched the reception of this trilogy. The Mandalorian and the Hand of Thrawn duology have come close, but the larger scale attempts with the Sequel Trilogy and the New Jedi Order series have been quite contested.
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a very famous novel, but how many people have even heard of its sequel Lila, let alone have actually read it?
• Franz Kafka claimed that this happened to all of the German Literature for a century after the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
• After her novel The Devil Wears Prada became an international hit and got turned into a movie, Lauren Weisberger wrote a sequel titled Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns. It wasn't as big a best-seller as the original, got a worse reception both from professional critics and regular readers, and didn't get turned into a movie. The main reason for its lower popularity is that the plot of The Devil Wears Prada, about how aspiring writer Andy works as a personal assistant to Runway magazine editor-in-chief Miranda Priestley, was based on Weisberger's time working on Vogue under the famously tyrannic Anna Wintour. This selling point isn't applicable to the sequel, which is more of a regular chick-lit comedy. In other words: Readers enjoyed The Devil Wears Prada because of its depiction of the world of fashion journalism and because of what a memorable villain Pristley constituted. When both those elements disappeared almost completely in the sequel, the readers lost interest.
• The smash hit The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, about teenage girl Starr witnessing a police shooting, was a huge hit that stayed on the NY Times bestseller list for over four years (and the number 1 spot for over a year!) without dropping off it once. When it eventually left the list, it came back soon after.
  • Its Spiritual Sequel On the Come Up, which takes place in the same fictional neighborhood but has no returning characters, debuted as a #1 New York Times bestseller, just like The Hate U Give did. But it was knocked from its #1 spot on its third week by The Hate U Give, which had been out for over two years by that point. Months after On the Come Up came out it was no longer on the best-seller list, while The Hate U Give was back at the top spot.
  • The prequel novel to The Hate U Give is called Concrete Rose and describes the life of Starr's dad before he had her. It was well-received by readers and critics, but left the NYT bestseller list before five months had gone by. Weeks after Concrete Rose had left the list, The Hate U Give was back at the top.
• Bonnie Bryant has not even attempted to pen another book after The Saddle Club series ended in 2001. This is most likely due to the fact that prior to the series creation Bryant had only ever written movie novelizations, making it very much possible that she has little interest in literature as an art form and that her legacy series only exists because said novelizations weren't paying the bills.
• We Need to Talk About Kevin has proven to be this for Lionel Shriver. She has written many books since Kevin (which came out in 2003), but while most of them have been generally positively reviewed, nothing has matched the fame or notoriety as Kevin, and Kevin is the only one of her books to have gotten a movie adaptation. Any new book she publishes will invariably have "from the author of We Need to Talk About Kevin" on it.
• Fifty Shades of Grey was an international phenomenon, and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years. The final one of its five sequels, Freed, dropped off after five weeks, and the author's first stand-alone novel, her sixth book to be published, only lasted for nine weeks.
• Mark Z. Danielewski's debut novel House of Leaves is widely acclaimed and considered a modern Cult Classic; his subsequent works, though well-respected in their own right, have never quite reached the level of notoriety and devotion as his first.