Why You Need To Write a Series
By Bill Ferris | September 20, 2014 |
Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.
What started as a tiny germ of a story has exploded in your brain like a Mentos in a bottle of Diet Coke. If you want your readers to get a taste of your frothy soda-splosion, you owe it to them to write an entire series. Here are a few tried-and-true methods to turn your ideas into a multi-book bonanza:
[pullquote]People in the know say that if you can’t sell the first book, nobody will want the rest of the series. However, it’s equally true that those people can shut their fat, stupid faces.[/pullquote]
First, the Benefits
- There’s no wrong way to write a series. In fact, if you leave a manuscript out in the spring rain, its spores will sprout sequels like mildew in your shower.
- With just a bit of padding, extra scenery, maybe an animal sidekick or two, you can expand nearly any idea into a trilogy. It’s a great way to get paid three times for basically writing one book.
- Writing a series saves you the trouble of crafting satisfying conclusions, character arcs, etc. You’ll deal with it in the next book! Oops, I mean the book after that! Of course, this will catch up to you when you get to the final book. But much like your chemistry final you didn’t study for until the night before the exam, one heroic effort of panic and suffering can make up for an entire semester of slacking off, mostly.
Strategies
photo by Claudia & Jerome
- Multiples of Three: When writing a series, you have to write at least three books. No one knows why.
- Build your momentum. Some writers spend years crafting their first book, sweating every comma until the manuscript practically sings. Who has that kind of time? Once you finish writing that first book, just keep going. Churn out as many books in your series as you can, as fast as you can. People in the know say that if you can’t sell the first book, nobody will want the rest of the series. However, it’s equally true that those people can shut their fat, stupid faces. They haven’t read your sequel to your unpublished novel, have they? When you sit your throne of skulls atop your pyramid made of hundred dollar bills from your mega-major deal, their pathetic mewling will be but the buzzing of flies to your ears.
- Class is rule number I. Use Roman numerals to denote the order of your series (Part I, II, III, etc.). It makes your work look classy and sophisticated. Why do you think the Super Bowl is so popular?
Planning Your Story Arc
[pullquote]If your first book happens on a farm, cash in on some fish-out-of-water laughs by setting book two in The Big City. From there, it’s on to the White House, then to outer space. They practically write themselves![/pullquote]
You can’t just throw books together willy-nilly. You need a unifying structure to keep things moving in a logical manner. Here are the most common story arcs for a series:
- The Full Circle:
- Book 1: Your hero’s magical origin story
- Book 2: Being a hero is hard!
- Book 3: Your hero travels backwards through time to the events of the first book. This gives a sense of completion, showing just how far your hero has come, and the time-travel aspect lets you explain away all the plot holes readers found in the first book.
- Location, location, location. If your first book happens on a farm, cash in on some fish-out-of-water laughs by setting book two in The Big City. From there, it’s on to the White House, then to outer space. They practically write themselves!
- The Body Snatcher: Take one of your trunk novels and make it part of the series simply by renaming the characters. When Lady Rutherfordtonshire from your Regency romance suddenly starts acting like a hard-case cyborg cop in the fifth book, well, that’s what we novelists call character development.
- The Contractual Obligation. Make your first book as good as it can be. Then, use the lessons you learned in the process to write an even better follow-up. Finally, complete your saga by making the third book the requisite three hundred pages or whatever so you can get back to your golf game. If you did your job right in books one and two, people will buy number three anyway purely out of habit.
Wrapping Things Up
It’s time to write the final book. Like a politician running for reelection, you made a lot of promises to your readers, and now’s the time to deliver if you want their vote. Or sales. You get the idea. You’ve seen how the presidency ages a person? Same deal with authors, except with more gray hair and beer guts. It’s a lot of pressure. But if you string your readers along long enough, you may get lucky and die before you have to finish it.
What are your strategies for building a series? Share them in the comments!
After college, Bill Ferris (he/him) left Nebraska for Florida to become a rich and famous rock star. Failing that, he picked up the pen to become a rich and famous novelist. He now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and looks forward to a life of poverty and ridicule.
Thanks for the advice, kind sir. I will immediately go and rename Book 1 of the trilogy Book I.
That ought to do it. I does have a nice look to it, and looks are everything. I understand readers are reluctant to start in the middle of a series, so ‘Book I’ should reassure them.
Ah. This is a wonderful, wonderful piece! My jimmies are soothed. Now all I need is advice for dealing with those pesky Hollywood agents clamoring for film rights.
Bill–
You seem like a nice guy, so how come you’re misleading people? Three books? I’m sorry, buddy, but that’s not a series, that’s a pipsqueak trilogy. If you’re talking real series, what you need to do is, you sit down and make a list of all the scary, sordid ways you can think of for adults to oppress adolescents. Preferably on some planet other than this one, otherwise here but after something really bad has happened–the loss of Facebook, say, or no more Wifi. Then you make another list of cool ways adolescents can defeat their adult oppressors. Now you’re ready. Anyone who can’t make lists of this kind will just have to give up on the whole series idea, and write a cookbook for young adults. Or create a new genre (arrested- development boomers?) and knock out a novel for this audience on, say, the challenges involved in drag queen cross-generational zombie dating.
I would write a successful series right now, but I’m laughing so hard from this article that I think I hurt something. *tears streaming down cheeks* Hilarious, good sir. Hilarious!
All too true. Great piece.
I’m going to make the first book of my series book 4, then come out with 5 and six. THEN, twenty years later, I’ll over-explain everything by releasing origin stories in books 1,2, and 3. Gonna be big. Putting a down payment on a boat today.
I’ve been developing an idea for a Cheerleader Trilogy. I think maybe it could be a genre. Pom Pom Noir? Although developing characters has been a challenge, as most of them are blonde and thin. Plus they all talk the same. If they talk at all. Most of the dialogue will be texting. I could actually get more books out of it, since some of the girls may go on to the Pros (think Dallas) or to a career coaching the up-and-comers. I don’t know, I think this might have legs (no pun).
Reminds me of a friend who complained about his teenage daughter bringing girlfriends home to swim in his pool. He admitted their bikinis were distracting, but then said, “Thank god, they talk.”
Bill- I started reading this post thinking it was going to totally make me ticked off. Instead, you made me laugh hysterically. What a great way to start a Saturday. I’m involved with writing fiction on a number of different levels. I’ve been saying for several years now that the idea of writing a series has become epidemic. I’m often asked to read and review books. Recently, a gentleman asked me for advice on how to plan his book tour. He was about halway through the first book of a ten book series. He hadn’t even finished or published book one! I had someone else ask for a review of a 3 book scifi story. I read book one. It had merit. But there were ten characters that were introduced into the story, that had major scenes, and simply disappeared: never to be mentioned again in book I. I asked the author about it and he said they reappeared in later books. Oh brother…
Reminds me of some of the multi-episodes of Korean dramas viewable at Drama Fever. Actually, I’ve watched enough of those that I know if one starts slow with lots of characters and seemingly unrelated action I better take notes–IF I can get through episode one, because it may prove a gem in the long haul–and sometimes that’s up to 40 episodes that, if released, I’ll marathon through if in the mood. The strategy can work–but I think he’d be better off writing the series first, or at least enough of it that it gets past episode 3 and has a following.
This is why I hate series (serieses? Seri? What’s the plural of that?). I don’t even like trilogies too much anymore. The only type of series I am willing to read now are the ones which have their own story archs-per book! What ever happened to those?
Bill, love the humor in your take on series. Who knew I’d was actually writing a series with my “Connection” romantic suspense novels which, as Anne mentioned, each have their own archs-per book. Good to know there is still someone who shares an interested in them.
Genuinely funny stuff though I’ll unashamedly admit I love a good series. Opportunities for extended character development and surprising storylines can be increased within a series.
James Lee Burke, Jo Nesbo, William Kent Krueger, Nelson DeMille, Martin Cruz Smith and Arnaldur Indriadson come to mind as gifted authors with excellent series.
Full discosure – my current WIP is book 2 following my recently released debut “Nerve Damage” (-:
Fun post!
All of my novels and a novella and several short stories I have written are a series interconnected somewhat by a running continuous storyline and repeat characters but moreso by a recurring and consistent frequency of verbage and nounage. For instance, across the board they contain regular use of the words ‘the’, ‘gun’, and ‘what?’ As well as such arc binding phrases as “Holy flying camel turds!” and “bright toothy grin”
Therefore there is no mistaking such signature trademarks and lucid prose to be that of yours truly.
Bill, you’ve just gotten me out of a nasty case of writers block with your genius suggestion for adding an animal sidekick. I’ll also add a dead body, and voila! the scene just writes itself!
Seriously, this post had me rolling.
Thanks for a great post. I laughed so hard reading your post, that I ended up being unsure if you were being actually being sarcastic…?
However, since I do believe that the whole concept of a series is what a lot of people love in entertainment – on tv as well as in books – I’m assuming that you are in fact being serious.
My next step was then to go look up all the series you’ve written and published on amazon, so I could buy them all at once… but didn’t find any…? Only found some kind of business book “Inside Private Equity”…? Are you writing under a different name? Or, gulp, are you preaching a gospel you don’t practice???
Christine, in case Bill doesn’t see your comment, I wanted to respond. He’s a jokester through and through–hence the disclaimer up top and the title “Hacks for Hacks”. You gotta love a dry sense of humor, don’t you? ;)