Thanks for this, I have been interested in your opinion on this subject for a long time.

And…I am a fan of the series Castle too, even if the romance never seems to get off the ground as much as I wish it would.

I liked your checklist. It looks like we have them all covered. We didn’t at first. At first we were going with a location that had a group of characters and each book was a new hero. That changed when our good guy convinced us he could handle being the constant throughout everything.

I do agree, that as a reader of the genre, I love a great series. I hate to see a good character come to an end and I love looking forward to the anticipation of that next great book.
Hopefully, readers will come to feel that way about ours someday.

If they do, you will have had a hand in it!

I don’t have a book written, yet. But it’s very useful and important for me to understand how to ‘get it right’ so I can ‘get it published’ down the line.

Thank you.

On the selling side of the equation, there’s a good reason for not selling a series right out of the gate. If your first book is successful, you’ll be kicking yourself—because you could have sold the second book for much more money with the success of the first one as leverage.

Thanks again for this terrific post. I’ll be sharing it with a ton of friends!

Same goes for Adriana, (by the way, she’s the favorite author I met who pushed me to write a novel). Her BSG series is astounding to say the least, yet each book is written as a stand-alone so well that I actually started with the second in the series, not knowing it even was a series until I got about halfway through that second book and discovered the first. I was surprised to find that I enjoyed the stories better read out of sequence.

As for me? Well, I’ve got to finish that first one before I can even think about a series, and I’ve no plans to go there anyway, at least not yet.

Thank you for another thought-provoking and well-said post.

The over-arcing storyline through the series doesn’t need to be backstoried to death in each succeeding book. Like the Harry Potter series, you don’t reiterate his whole history.

They are “stand alone” in the sense each is a complete 4-part structure, etc., but not necessarily stand-alone in the sense the reader could pick up any one of them and make sense of the entire over-arcing plot line.

In the Harry Potter series, you’ve just about got to start with Sorcerer’s Stone and read them in sequence. The over-arcing plot sequence appears to be time-framed; each one is the next year at Hogwarts. We learn in the first book that Professor Snape is antagonistic and perhaps a bit of the why. By the third book, we know pretty much who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. If Bad Guy A shows up, we know he’s a bad guy, we don’t need to be shown that again.

My four novels are blatantly labeled Book 1, Book 2, etc., in the blurbs and the foreword encourages the reader to do them in sequence. Yeah, they’ll all be getting a major rewrite to become stand-alone in the sense of each one having the proper structure, but each one advances the over-arching plot line.

Might also want to examine your overall theme throughout the series. Each of your series might have a sub-theme, but each needs to be consistent to the overall theme.

Yep, that’s a lot of design work at the beginning. Tough, but it’s worth it.

Mind you even if you sell the first book you aren’t guaranteed to get to write the second if you don’t get sales, so…

From the start of our novel we knew we wanted to make it into a series. We also knew that each book, especially the first, had to work as a stand alone. We resolved our hero’s mission. Wrapped it all up nice and neat at the end, but there were a few smaller things we left unresolved on purpose.

And since we’re going both the route of self-publishing and looking to get picked up by a major publishing house, we’re moving right along into book two.

Hey, it doesn’t hurt to dream, right? If there’s a story to tell, tell it! So we are.

I’m wondering though, since so many of us were brought up on series like Terry Brooks, Terry Pratchett and others, could the market eventually change their minds and start looking at prospective series as a whole?

I do see your point that if the first one doesn’t sell it doesn’t make sense to buy a whole series from the start if there’s no guarantee it’ll be a hit.

On the other hand, the same could be said of taking a chance on a single book.

What do you think? Are more authors leaning towards series these days?