Step Five: Is your novel a stand-alone or part of a series?
My personal opinion is that, where possible, authors should plan to write a series of books. This has advantages in both the writing and the marketing:
Research
You can utilise your research into time and place for more than one book, reducing average research time per book.
Characters
You can utilise characters in more than one book, which means you have a more complete characterisation for minor characters (as they will be major characters in another book in the series). This gives your reader a better sense that she knows your characters and can relate to them.
Publishers
Publishers like a series, because a successful first book provides a ready-made audience for subsequent books. Publishers often take advantage of this to include teasers for the next book in the series, whetting the appetite of the reader.
First Book Free
Many publishers (and self-publishers) will make the ebook edition of the first book in a series free or very cheap (say, 99 cents) to encourage readers to try an new author and hopefully purchase additional books in the series, or some of the author’s back list titles.
Additional Editions
A series also gives publishers (or self-publishers) the option of increasing the overall sales by producing a reduced-price series-in-1 volume after the publication of the final book in a trilogy.
The current trend in a romance series is for each book to focus on one couple, who get their Happy Ever After at the end of the book. Subsequent books will feature a different couple as the hero or heroine, but will include some scenes with the characters from previous books. A series may follow:
- Siblings or family members (e.g. Kaye Dacus’s Brides of Bonneterre trilogy);
- Close friends or work colleagues (e.g. Irene Hannon’s Heroes of Quantico trilogy);
- A specific location (e.g. Gayle Roper’s Seaside series or Susan May Warren’s Deep Haven series);
A common theme (e.g. DiAnn Mills’s Call of Duty series). This can be less popular with readers, as we don’t get to see any of the characters we have come to know in the earlier books; - A family through time (e.g. Gilbert Morris’s Wakefield Dynasty, Jack Cavanagh’s American Family Portrait, or Roseanna M White’s new Culper Ring series). Each successive book follows one member of the next generation through their defining moment. These are usually romances, in that the family member meets their future spouse, and one of the advantages is the ability to refer back to previous characters (generations) to give a sense of continuity. One of the disadvantages (from the point of view of the author) is that these series require a lot of research, as each book is set in a different time period.
The trilogy that takes three or more books to tell one story has fallen out of popularity, although authors such as Jamie Carie are still using this format. Personally, I don’t favour it as I don’t like cliffhanger endings, but it can be successful.
Not all series fall in the romance genre (although most do). Mysteries are often written in a series, with the focus of each novel on solving the mystery. Authors such as Mindy Starns Clark or Julianna Deering will include a romantic subplot that sees some movement in each story with a full resolution only at the end of the series.
How many books in a series?
Trilogies are the most popular, although some series will have four or more books. Other authors will set more than one series in the same character universe, which allows them to keep up with previous characters while focusing on a new set. Susan May Warren is currently trying this with her Christiansen series (set in the same location as her Deep Haven series), and Karen Kingsbury took it to a ridiculous extreme with the Baxter family: a total of twenty-three related books across the Redemption, Firstborn, Sunshine, Above the Line and Bailey Flannigan series.
Read in order or stand alone?
It can be very annoying for the reader to pick up the second or third book in a series and find it difficult because they don’t understand the backstory that was covered in previous novels. Equally, the reader who has faithfully followed the series doesn’t want to be drowned in repetitive backstory (see the Amazon reviews for Coming Home by Karen Kingsbury).
So does the reader have to read the books in order to get the full story, or can each novel function as a stand-alone story? Ideally, both. And this is the trick in writing a successful series: to include enough information about the previous novels to ensure the story is a well-rounded stand-alone novel, but still satisfy those series readers who want to know what has happened to their favourite characters.
Are you writing a stand-alone or a series? What advantages do you see in writing a stand-alone novel?
Next week we will discuss how understanding your genre will help you determine the ideal word count for your novel.
