For a publisher, producing a successful book series is like winning the lottery. The rewards can be enormous and ongoing.
Check out these numbers
The Harry Potter behemoth towers over all the rest, with more than 400 million copies sold. Nancy Drew? The 175 installments of the beloved mystery series have sold more than 200 million. New editions of the earliest stories and the latest episodes fly off the shelves at the rate of hundreds of thousands each year.
Twilight’s four books have already sold a total of more than 100 million. And Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy has sold more than 35 million copies and counting: His publisher Alfred A. Knopf estimates that by year’s end they will have sold a phenomenal 15 million copies in 2010, or roughly the equivalent of recent works by John Grisham, Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer and Stephen King combined (LATimes).
Scroll down for tips to writers developing a series character
The trend in multi-book deals
So publishers are always working the series angle, both with authors already on the roster, and with new writers and books under consideration. If we smell a potential series in a promising new submission, we try to nail it down with a multiple book contract. That trend is apparent in the numbers of new multi-book deals listed in Publishers Marketplace over the past 12 months, with the greatest number in the following genres:
Top genres for multi-book deals in 2010
Romance – 108 deals
Mystery & Crime – 73
Young Adult – 56
Middle Grade – 53
Science Fiction – 31
Thrillers – 29
Paranormal – 27
The challenge for writers: how to keep a character alive
I’m working now with several authors who are developing series of books with the same hero or heroine. In each case these writers are confronting the challenge of sustaining reader interest in a serial character who faces a different dramatic crisis in each book, but also has a compelling personal life that’s constantly evolving in exciting ways.
One approach that works for many writers is to write an ambitious kind of fictional autobiography, not a true-to-life memoir, but a romantic idealization of the author’s own life. A reader of this blog, Kathy Waller, summed it up perfectly in a recent comment: “My main character is part me and part the person I would like to be. She’s allowing me to rebuild my hometown as it was–and wasn’t–when I was growing up.”
As a developmental editor, therefore, I approach the work with the perspective of an entire series. Certain editorial issues unique to writing a serial character occur repeatedly. I’ve found the following points to be useful for writers to keep in mind:
Tips for creating a serial character
Let them age – Harry Potter grows up, about one year for each of the seven books. Your characters can get older too; a little bit at a time, no matter what their age is in the first book. They can face problems left over by the last book and also increase their skills, perceptions, strategies, and deepen their relationships. As a variation, you can write a prequel, set in time before the first book. Tom Clancy did that with Patriot Games, featuring his CIA agent Jack Ryan, who was introduced three years earlier in the Hunt for Red October.
The opposite approach works too, of course, as Nancy Drew fans know. The blond sleuth stays forever young, though she aged from 16 to 18 at some point early in the series.
Keep them close to your heart – Write from deep inside your psyche about what you know and care about the most. Pamela Adams, a mystery writer who commented recently here on the blog said, “My protagonist is my husband. His partner/sleuth is my former daughter-in-law and his girlfriend is me– only younger and sexier.”
Give them an interesting day job — Your hero could be a doctor-without-borders or a truck driver, as long as their daily activities thrust them regularly into new situations to test their mettle and provide a chance to move forward on the public and private levels of their lives.
Make every new crisis relate to their inner development – No event can be random. When a new character is introduced, keep their identity as a savior or lethal opponent up in the air. Consider every book as if it were a self-contained mythical quest like Odysseus, and let your hero keep proving himself, overcoming his deepest personal self-doubt.
Surprise us – Avoid getting stuck in a formulaic pattern. The heroine, for example, who’s happily married with children for the first two books, could have a marital crisis and end up leaving her husband in the third book. Whether or not she returns can depend on the new crisis she stumbles into on her day job as a bio-hazards expert or a pastry chef, or whatever she does. Or have your stalwart front-line combat reporter suffer from an episode of psychotic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that makes him violent, hateful, terrorize his friends and lovers, even join the enemy. Keep us guessing as to how it will turn out.
Are you developing a serial character?
We’d be so interested to hear how you’ve tackled sustaining interest from one story to the next. I’ll watch for any questions.
Joe,
It’s usually a good idea to have as few characters as possible and none that don’t play a significant role in your story. I like the yakuza connection and your premise seems very interesting overall. But from what you’ve presented so far, it does sound like you may have too many peripheral characters and an over abundance of story material in the first book.
Better to start simple and build up the series with new cases, personalities, and events more gradually.
Thanks for the great post. I’m writing a series about a Japanese detective. The first book centers on his last case, which reveals his ties to a yakuza family and his wife’s terminal illness. The second and subsequent books deal with his transition to becoming a private detective, dealing with being a widower, and the crazy cases that come his way. The stories take place in Tokyo and environs. I have outlined seven stories and almost all of the key characters who appear in the series are in the first novel. My question is: I’ve heard some critiques about two many characters introduced too soon, or too many characters are distracting to the reader. I have the main character and his sidekick, two other detectives on the team investigating the murder, the suspects (three) and side characters who pop up in the course of the investigation. Any thoughts? Thanks.
Thank you so much for that. I am working on a series currently so it was great for me to read. All I need now is a literary agent or publisher.
I just discovered your website and am enjoying reading through your posts. Thanks for the insights :)
A really interesting post. I had no idea that the series was so attractive in publishing.
I’m just finishing the third in my aeries of books about quitting my job as a fashion editor and moving to rural France. It began as one book: Tout Sweet: Hanging Up My High Heels For A New Life In France (to be published in the US this August) and then, encouraged by reader feedback and emails, I just kept going.
I’m planning a fourth in the Tout series but I do wonder how much longer I can carry on writing about my own life (and that of neighbours’ and friends) without been run out of the village.
At the moment, they are all still speaking to me (just!)
I have completed the first two books in a middle grade mystery series about Girl Science Geeks. Different venues in different locations all lead to them solving a mystery. Most agents that I have gleaned info from are advising not to mention WIP. Their theory is: if an agent is interested in the first one, they will let you know if they think a sequel is advisable. I have a request for a full ms reading and never heard back from the guy. Others haven’t read past the query. I got the feeling that an unpublished author should never whisper series. I know, I know but Ms. Rowling and Ms. Meyer are anomalies. Also, Girl Science Geeks don’t sound fastastical enough to be fun or hilarious enough to get past the initial query letter… but there are a lot geeky girls that read. At this point, I would entertain any thoughts.
My protagonist is 80-85 percent me based on my law enforcement career; flaws are plus/minus mine, same with her strengths. She is a forty something homicide detective who’s been with the department for twenty years. I gave her a partner, a rookie in her late twenties, who is street-wise beyond her years. My protagonist has the personal back story. The protagonist is the professional career coach. The partner is the personal life-style coach. And all the time they are solving horrific homicides and saving each other.
There are other characters who are part of the protagonist’s network of “friends” that she can call upon when needed – and they are, which brings in all segments of the justice system as the story demands.
I have three sets of series going. In one, I changed my childhood antics into a children’s fiction story. (I was quite weird.) It’s easy to write the sequel because the MC is me as a child, and because I know her. It’s also easy to keep her personality the same in each story. Though I use things I actually did, the MC is much more outspoken. I usually make my characters grow a little older, but not always.
I hate writing the first few paragraphs of a sequel because I have a bad habit of adding too much back story, and then having to delete it. I want to introduce the characters, but also for each book to stand alone.
Interestingly, this seems to cut across all genres. I was surprised to hear this, (as a PB writer) at the 1st writers conference I attended. It wasn’t until I thought about the “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus” series; “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” series and the “No, David” series that I realized it’s a logical idea that has been around for a good number of years already. As one of the commenters above notes, publishers thought series were a good idea when Nancy Drew was published.
“We’d be so interested to hear how you’ve tackled sustaining interest from one story to the next.”
By planning for it to be a serial from the start and breaking up the character’s arc to span several books. I see the plot of a first book as being a stand-a-lone, but the character’s arc for said book as being only one joint in a character’s vast emotional skeleton.
Also, having more than one major character helps. Romance novels do series by creating a group of friends and then rotating to a new friend’s romance with each book, so that familiar characters show up in every story, but the romance is always new and fresh. Japanese manga and “light novels” do series by having an ensemble cast of friends who get their own character arcs that the lead character becomes involved with or watches from the sidelines.
Watching how T.V. series do it can also be useful. A season of DOCTOR WHO, for example, has individual adventures from episode to episode, but they all feed into one major arc that is resolved during the season climax, as if they are all puzzle pieces making up one, big jigsaw landscape. Television keeps the audience engaged by feeding in little mysteries throughout individual stories, reminding the viewer that something really, really big and really, really secret is happening behind the scenes.
You said give them an interesting job. I say, give them the lifestyle of a transient, someone who can or has to move from place to place, job to job, romance to romance, or adventure to adventure. This is what detectives do in mystery novels by moving from dead body to dead body, and what characters from just about any genre can do to keep things fresh.
Alan,
How many hours do you spend behind a computer each day? I’d bet eleven to twelve.
Does anyone wanna make a bet?
Sheila
Joe,
Your series of books for a couple’s stages of life sounds like a great idea and if well done, should be very attractive to readers, agents or publishers. This isn’t the same as aging in fiction, however, since it’s the reader, not the characters, who are getting older.
What keeps a non-fiction series going can be not only aging, of course, but also creative new ways of approaching a related information or how-to market. For example, I did a book called The Secrets of Happily Married Men by Scott Haltzman MD, which did so well that we did The Secrets of Happily Married Women, and then The Secrets of Happy Families. Similarly, we published Fighting for Your Marriage, Fighting for Your Jewish Marriage, and Fighting for Your African-American Marriage. The trick is to stay focused on readers who have a relationship to your knowledge base, in my experience with non-fiction series.
What about in the non-fiction realm? I already have “Financial Mistakes of New College Grads”, and am starting work on “Financial Mistakes of Newly Married Couples” and have some research for “Financial Mistakes of New Parents”. Is this the sort of “aging” that a publisher would want, as the series will cover several generally sequential events in a person’s life?
I find that in trilogies, the second book often meanders, wasting time until the second half, which in turn, often just sets up the final installment. At the risk of infuriating teen girls, I thought that the first 200 pages of New Moon could have been cut at no loss to anyone. On the other hand, one YA trilogy that stayed tight, focused and compelling through all three books, in a way that I loved, was Anna Godbersen’s Luxe series.
Love this blog, by the way!
http://www.how-2-get-published.com/
Sheila,
Yes, I’ve worked with both agents and writers on titles that are or will be in a series. Developmental editing on these projects may address issues like sustaining the original characters but creating new challenges in their private and public lives, points of view, and life cycles, as well as the usual core elements — story, relationships, pacing, narrative structure.
Very interesting Post on book/character series.
Alan, as an outstanding freelance editor, do agents ask you if you can help edit, say, a series?
Thanks!
Hi,
Very helpful comments and article. I just finished a novella with interconnected short stories in which the different characters return in some chapters as the friends of the protagonist. This novella could be extended to several volumes and I am certainly encouraged to think about that now. Thanks so much.
Johanna
Wonderful blog post! Very informative! I’m thinking about possibly developing GODS IN THE MACHINE as a series, with the main character growing as a person and being called upon to solve new mysteries. As I rewrite GODS IN THE MACHINE, I’m thinking about ways in which to develop Levana Anderson (whose name I’ve changed to Lucy Anderson, since Lucy is a more recognizable name) to leave that possibility open.
Thanks for this post! My comment is late, but heartfelt. My agent asked recently if I saw my manuscript as a series. She was preparing a proposal for publishers and while I hadn’t considered it at length before, this post sealed it for me. I took some time and outlined two additional titles in the potential series before replying. Now, *crossing fingers*
Thanks again!
Thanks for the feedback, Alan. They are jigsaw-like in that they are all telling a part of the story from different realms of the One world, different casts and settings, but they all tie in. They will all be stand-alone, but to understand the whole picture the reader would have to read them all.
I’m working on making the first one as compelling as I possibly can :) I’ll have to look up Rashomon to see what he’s done.
Madison,
Your simultaneous stories sound intriguing, and inspire me to wonder if they’re like a Rashomon-style alternative reality, or a jigsaw that fits together with complementary points of view.
In either case, the first book in the series will need to have both terrific characters and a very compelling story to not only succeed, sell, and make a second book attractive to the publisher, but also have room for expanding without repetition.
I have an unpublished series set in 12th century England with magic, fantasy and history wrapped up in equal parts. What I have done is change the narrator in each book so the point of view becomes individual though some of the events over lap. Seeing my book world through the eyes of a young magical apprentice and then in a later book a knight of the realm makes an interest contrast, to me anyhow. As the plots advance, the characters age, mature, grow, marry, have children, die. I often wonder if this series could be published, but I confess I have not worked hard to test that question. Any thoughts on those possibilities? I have been writing for fun, discipline and the improvement of my personal skills.
I am also writing a series with a few different ones sitting in the idea bin. I’ve learned in the past year that I am more of a long writer and series fit the bill quite well. Most of my series have the characters developing in different ways throughout the books. The one I’m really focusing on right now is a series where the characters deal with genetic mutations along with a rising revolution against the societal discrimination against the mutants. It helps to have a character that is able to grow and change along with the rest of the cast, keeping things fresh and interesting for the reader. I hope that in each book that readers remain interested in the characters but will have to wait and see.
great post/topic.
Thanks
JQ
My series-in-progress isn’t quite sequential or linear, yet book 2 will have some character overlap (not a whole lot). The novels are more simultaneous than serial, each with a cast of characters with plot-lines having an impact on a larger common theme encompassed by these, and the other books I plan to write in the future.
Does this count as an enticing feature like serials? It’s just the way they’re evolving. I’m not sure there are others to compare it to. If you know of anything like that, I’d be interested.
This is an interesting topic and close to my heart.
I had two series running – crime thrillers about a nun who used to be a cop; and a psychic spy in the 1970s/80s (Czechoslovakia, Iran, Afghanistan, Falklands etc) – but the publisher went to the wall. Now I’m trying to get agents/other publishers interested and their response is deafening (if silence can be loud). I’ve had good reviews and both sets of characters have appealed to the readers. I’ve got plotlines, characters set up for continuing but really there’s little point doing the follow up books unless I can get these out there again. (I’ve alsos got 8 standalone books published!) Frustrated genre writer.
David Mark Brown,
You won’t be restricting the benefits of a series if you change genres from mystery or romance to political thriller, since there is a natural connection, and those often arbitrary categories often overlap. Violent crimes occur in political struggles, horses and goats appear in romances, and all of the above can happen in a fictional reality held together by an alternate history, i.e. the South wins the civil war, JFK is not assassinated etc.
Be careful, however, to sustain consistent characters, whomever is the lead for each story, and let the entire cast appear in a way that evokes sentiments and appealing attachments that you’ve accumulate in each successive story. Good work, though, these are creative ideas!
Thanks for the great post. My question is closely linked with Stuart’s comments above. I am just starting the first book in what I hope will be a series. My plan has been to have several characters cross over from book to book, but to focus on different ones as the lead protagonist/antagonist. I was even thinking of doing a bit of a genre-bending dance between the books (the first involves much more shooting, horses, goats, etc. while the next may be a political thriller). The main thread is the same alternate history that all the books will follow. Could I be handcuffing myself some by changing main characters and genres? (nullifying the benefits of writing a series?)
Thank you so much for answering my question.
My main character changes from a nervous wreck into a reluctant leader in the first book, from a very frustrated leader to a undercover rescuer in book two, and a destroyer in book three. This was a good post for me to read to make sure that the changes are believable and the new characters add tension and anticipation. Thanks.
I’ve made my series three separate, stand alone stories with a central running theme. Whilst there is crossover of characters in each of the books I’ve also “rotated” my characters a little ie, the main character in the first book takes more of a secondary role in the second and third books and other characters come to the fore. I think it helps to keep the series fresh.
Interesting post. I was surprised to see that paranormal was on the bottom of the list. I guess I need to rewrite the ending on my paranormal/reincarnation story. I never thought of taking to the next step (series) but I guess it’s something I need to consider. Thanks again for the information.
Najela,
If an agent/editor/publisher wants a series, it’s the writer’s choice: either “hurray” or “no thanks”. You don’t have to write more than one book about a character you intended for a standalone, unless you’re inspired to think again. OK, you might say, what’s so interesting about this character, how could they develop and change, what are the special skills and personality traits that could apply to a new dilemma, or even a series of stories? Sounds like an interesting creative challenge to me, but then I’m speaking from the perspective of an acquisitions editor or publisher who wants to sell good books.
There are series where each story (mostly Romance) has a different pair of hero/heroine/couple, but they’re related to the other couples in other books. Sometimes it’s by blood, sometimes it’s an interesting secondary character that gets his/her own story told.
Stephanie Laurens did that with the Bar Cynster series and she’s entwined several series together. Lynn Viehl did that with her Darkyn vampires and Ilona Andrews is doing that with her Edge series of Fantasy Romance.
I think it works because you get to like a good secondary character and when you see the next book you think, “Yeah, I kind of wondered what happened with him.”
I’m curious to know, what do you do with a character that was meant to be in a stand alone series, but an editor/agent/publisher wants a series? In other words, how do you extend a character’s story to cover a series when you originally only planned for a standalone?
I think the type of the series also affects whether or not the character changes. If it’s an open-ended series like Nancy Drew, then it’s okay for the character to stay the same. If it’s a series with a clear story arc, like a fantasy trilogy, the characters are expected to develop as the story develops. One of the rare criticisms that I’ve heard about Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series was that the main character Katniss didn’t change. The story itself developed from being about Katniss’s personal struggle to stay alive in the first book, to a revolution and government overthrow in the last book, but some readers felt that Katniss herself never moved beyond caring about her own situation.