Tag Archives: series

Ahh. There’s nothing like kicking back in a comfy chair with a good series. While I am not a fast reader by any means, you might finish a book in one day and go right on to the second book. When you look at that cover, what are you thinking about? Are you expecting another exciting installment in the adventure? Are you anticipating it will be just as good as the first?

I’ll admit it. Every single time I pick up book two in a series, I have high hopes and expect it to be just as good as, if not better than, the first book. And I should seriously know better by now. Because almost every series I read has a major book two problem, especially trilogies. I’ve taken to calling book two (in any series) The Ugly Middle Child. No offense to all of you middle children out there, I’m sure you’re lovely and probably gorgeous.

Whenever this topic comes up in conversation (which is often, you’d be surprised), I always come back to The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien, book two in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Why? Because it’s a perfect example of a book two done well, at least in my humble opinion.

Why?

*Caution: spoilers ahead! I repeat: spoilers ahead!*

Important Things Happen

Gandalf is reincarnated as Gandalf the White. Ents! Shelob! F*ing Wormtongue! If you weren’t entertained by The Two Towers, then you might want to go back and re-read it. While it does what many book twos do — sets up everything for the end — it also deepens the characters by splitting them up to have individual quests. And boy are those quests cool. Some book twos simply exist to set up book three, and the author forgets to make the journey fun. They also forget to make sure crucial things happen in book two, which will make the climax of book three all the more wonderful.

The Introduction of an Integral Character

Gollum. He was whispered about in the first book and we knew him from The Hobbit, but in book two, we really get to see him. We learn his story and see his suffering. And for many of us, we had no idea what an important part he would play in the end. Now that’s how you set up an integral character.

Facing the Consequences of What Happened in Book One

In The Fellowship of the Ring, Boromir is overcome with the allure of the ring, and Frodo and Sam split off to go to Mordor alone. The consequences of this decision play out in the beginning of book two – Boromir is killed by Lurtz, the Uruk-hai leader. While the movie has Boromir die at the end of the first movie, the consequences of his actions are played out in the second book and in the second movie. When Frodo and Sam come across Faramir, Boromir’s brother, they expect the same ring-lust. However, Faramir must grapple with the truth of his brother’s death and resolve not to be like him. Real consequences and real decisions, which only pave the way to an explosive book three.

Too often, book twos feel slow and sloggy, and only serve the purpose of setting up book three. Let us take Tolkien’s example of what a good book two looks like: one full of action, intrigue, important character building, fun, the introduction of integral characters, and making sure the characters face the consequences of their actions from book one, making them stronger and all the more ready to face their ultimate battles in book three.

What do you think? If you liked The Two Towers, what did you like about it? Why was it successful as a book two? Any more examples of a book two done well? I’d love to read about it!

Episodic Vs Sequential: TV Shows and Novel Series

February 14, 2018

mary

Mary Pletsch Mystery Our Favorite Fiction Romance & Erotica No Comments

TV storytelling has changed with the advent of VCRs, DVDs and streaming services. In the golden age of TV, it was much more common for each episode of a TV show to be a self-contained story.

The reason is simple: showrunners couldn’t presume that viewers had been able to watch the previous episodes. If you were busy during the show’s airing time, then you missed the show. So, it made sense for each episode to stand alone. Title sequences introduced new viewers to the show’s characters, theme and mood. Even if you’d never seen a show before, you could get a pretty good idea what it was about before the day’s episode started. (And title sequences are getting shorter these days, or being left out entirely, now that most viewers no longer need them to learn about the show they’re about to see.)

The problem with episodic storytelling is that it’s more difficult to show long-term character development, or to give events permanent consequences. In its purest form, the end of the episode presses the reset button, returning the characters to the status quo at the beginning of the next episode. Still, some shows developed a certain sense of continuity: origin episodes, introduction of new characters or departure of old ones, key events in season finales.

With the advent of the VCR, people could record shows and watch them later at their convenience. And now, with streaming services, it’s become common for viewers to “binge” on a show and watch the entire season over the course of a few days.

(This is not to say that the golden age of TV didn’t have serials–soap operas, anyone?–or that there isn’t great episodic TV being made right now. )

But general trends changed when it became easier for people to keep up with their favourite shows. When data suggested that people enjoyed viewing shows in a single sitting (or two or three), showrunners naturally made shows catering to those kind of viewing habits. There’s now a strong trend towards “bingeable” shows – long running serials that tell a multi-thread story over the course of a season, and an even bigger story over the course of a series. Actions have consequences, and characters grow and change – but it’s rare for a viewer to pick a random episode in the middle of a series just to “check it out,” now that it’s easier to start at the beginning.

When you’re writing a novel series, which model do you want to follow?

In part, it depends on genre. For example, if you’re writing a category romance novel series, it’s often expected that a new reader should be able to pick up a book at any point in the series and enjoy the story. Additionally, romance stories derive their tension from showing how the hero and heroine get together–tension that’s hard to show once they’re an established couple. As a result, category romance series have developed a certain pattern. Each book in the series takes place in the same world, but each book (usually) focuses on a new hero and heroine. The supporting characters are often either the heroes/heroines of previous books, or future hero/heroines of upcoming stories. As a result, fans are able to return to a world they love, while new readers won’t be lost if they aren’t familiar with the supporting characters from previous books, and the primary tension is still focused on watching a couple overcome their obstacles to be together. However, this formula makes it difficult to show character relationships growing and changing beyond the book that the characters “star” in.

On the other hand, some series all but require you read them in order, or you’ll be lost continuity-wise. For myself, I love a big, ongoing, developing story where characters’ actions have consequences, and the plot unfolds based on the choices the characters made previously. But this technique makes it harder for new readers to “jump in” in the middle.

And some series walk a middle line. Each book is a self-contained arc, but if you put them together, you’ll also see a series-long story arc developing. For example, in some mystery series, a new mystery gets solved in each book, but as the series progresses, the main characters change, develop, and grow, giving the series a sense of continuity and ongoing development.

In large part, it depends on what you as a writer want to do. Do you want to write a series where each book focuses on a different character in the same universe? Do you want the flexibility to add “new adventures” if the series takes off?

Or do you have a long-term vision for a story that’s too long for just one (or three, or more) books to hold? Do you want to show a character growing and changing over the long term, and do you believe that you can convince audiences to care about this character, to choose to spend time in their company over and over again?

If the first book in a series hooks a reader, they’re likely to come back for more—particularly when they feel that the story is “going somewhere” and that each book “matters” because events have consequences. But there’s also something to be said for a format that’s welcoming to new readers, and doesn’t require them to put Book 4 back on the shelf and go looking for Book 1 in order to understand what’s going on. There’s audiences for both types of series (as well as the middle gorund) so choose what method best suits your genre and the story you want to tell.

About Mary:

Mary Pletsch is a glider pilot, toy collector and graduate of the University of Huron College, the Royal Military College of Canada and Dalhousie University. She is the author of several previously published short stories in a variety of genres, including science fiction, steampunk, fantasy and horror. She currently lives in New Brunswick with Dylan Blacquiere and their four cats.

Prewriting from a Series Perspective

October 24, 2017

Gregory D. Little

Gregory D. Little Outlines No Comments

So you’re writing a series, say the third volume, just to pull something totally at random and in which in no way applies to me. How do you approach prewriting when you’re looking not just at the book alone, but also in its place in the series?

Well, in my dad’s favorite answer to almost any question: it depends.

First off, what kind of series are you writing? Is it the episodic sort in which can go on more or less forever and which a reader can more or less start at any point and easily pick it up? Or is it a closed, serialized story with a clear beginning, middle, and eventual endpoint? Each series type faces a critical issue of balance, but in different ways.

For an episodic series, each entry is a standalone story following (usually) the same protagonist. For obvious reasons, this style lends itself well to procedural-style stories (crimes that need solving or medical cases that … also need solving).

Any series of this sort, one with no planned ending, is operating on a ticking clock. There are only so many stories that are worth writing for a given series. The longer it runs, the more likely installments will begin feeling like retreads. This is doubly dangerous for a series of novels with one writer, who is going to have their own tendencies and blind spots and, unless their name is China Mieville, will eventually start to fall into the same story ruts given the same story ingredients.

That being said, one surefire way to shorten your clock is to break the key elements that make your series work in the first place. Whether it’s author boredom or fear of getting stuck in a rut, I’m talking about change for the sake of change.

To look at this from a television perspective, The X-Files really began to fall apart as a series when David Duchovney’s Mulder left the show (followed eventually by Gillian Anderon’s Scully). At that point, two entirely new characters, Agents Doggett and Reyes, became the show’s new leads. And honestly, they were fine in the roles. If the show had begun with them as the leads, it might have found its own kind of success. But readers had been tuning in for years to watch Mulder and Scully battle the paranormal and their own repressed feelings for one another. In this case, the actors wanted out, and the showrunners can’t be blamed for that. But writers would do well to take note. It’s important to have a good sense of your series’ sine qua non, that which it cannot exist without. Remove or change the central dynamic that makes your series appealing at your peril.

A serialized story with a planned beginning, middle, and end faces different balance challenges. Each volume needs not just to be an entry in a larger narrative, but also to tell a satisfying story in its own right. This requires more work on the author’s part than in our episodic series, where each story is more or less standalone with the same characters and/or settings.

But because our story is fulfilling double-duty, it also has to be a part of a larger narrative (both in terms of plot and character), and that means treating the entire series as one enormous story, with its own sense of rising action and stakes. And this leads us to the great danger of the serialized story: the all-consuming desire to top what has come before. It’s very easy to fall into this trap, to look at each installment as needing to be somehow bigger, with higher stakes, and wind up with a story that is more ridiculous than thrilling. It’s a good idea to approach this sort of series with an idea of what you wish your final conflict in your final volume to be. This allows you to calibrate the individual conflicts driving the individual series entries and make sure you aren’t peaking too early.

Fiction of all sorts is rife with examples of this, particularly with bad guys that are all but unkillable in the first installment and become mere cannon fodder by the final entry. The Wheel of Time makes Rand al’Thor’s first kill of a villainous trolloc an epic struggle in which he nearly dies. By the end of the series, trollocs are less effective than imperial stormtroopers at menacing our heroes. That’s okay in this instance, because Robert Jordan effectively shows the reader how Rand and his friends learn to become bigger and bigger bad-asses in a believable progression. It doesn’t wreck our suspension of disbelief because Jordan puts in the work.

By contrast, when Star Trek: The Next Generation introduces the borg, they are a terrifying and all-but-invincible foe. Two series later, in Star Trek: Voyager, the drive to increase series ratings brings the borg back on a regular basis. Where previously a single borg ship was able to obliterate entire fleets of starships, now the Voyager successfully contends with the borg week-in and week-out. The villains are robbed of their menace.

Writing a series adds several dimensions of difficulty to your job. It means having to keep multiple books in mind at once, both ones that have come before and ones you haven’t written yet. But no matter which kind you are writing, a little thought and planning ahead of time can save you a lot of pain (and painful rewrites) down the road.

About the Author: Gregory D. Little

Rocket scientist by day, fantasy and science fiction author by night, Gregory D. Little began his writing career in high school when he and his friend wrote Star Wars fanfic before it was cool, passing a notebook around between (all right, during) classes. His novels Unwilling Souls and Ungrateful God are available now from ebook retailers and trade paperback through Amazon.com. His short fiction can be found in The Colored Lens, A Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology, Dragon Writers: An Anthology, and the upcoming Undercurrents: An Anthology of What Lies Beneath. He lives with his wife and their yellow lab.

You can reach him at his website (www.gregorydlittle.com), his Twitter handle (@litgreg) or at his Author Page on Facebook.

How to Get Noticed on Kobo

June 24, 2015

fictorians

Branding Business Conventions Guest Posts Mark Leslie Lefebvre Marketing Networking Professional Behavior Publishing 3 Comments

A guest post by Mark Leslie Lefebvre.

You’ve heard it before, you’ll hear it again. Maybe this time you’ll remove yourself from the attachment you have with your beautifully bouncing “baby” of a book and listen.

Getting noticed starts with a good cover. And not just a good cover, but an excellent cover. And not just an excellent cover, but an excellent professional cover. And not just an excellent professional cover but one that appeals to your target audience – respectful of the genre you’re targeting.

Let me be brutally honest here – and it’s not easy to say, but it’s something I’ve seen time and again. I have authors who, on Kindle, are selling reasonably well, some of them selling exceptionally well, who approach me and ask why they’re not selling much or at all on Kobo. Then I look at their books and the first thing I see is a cover that makes me cringe and start trying to come up with ways to avoid telling them I think the cover is horrible.

It’s difficult to tell someone their baby is ugly – but it’s even more difficult to present a less than professional looking book on any of our featured spotlights or main pages.

Why am I harping on about something I’m sure you’ve read a thousand times? Because it’s true. Kobo’s website is far more merchandised than a site like Amazon – and as such, getting a human’s attention and holding it long enough to get them to read the synopsis and then check out the price all starts with a great cover.

And that’s one of the main ways that titles get selected for various features on Kobo’s website.

The metadata that you enter is another way to stand out as professional. It can also help you with helping us convert readers of one book in your series to the rest of that series. Entering consistent series title data plus the volume number in that series can lead to this. There is a great article posted here that outlines some of the benefits. (Selling More of Your Series Books on Kobo)

Here’s an example of how a series title is displayed, helping customers see that this book is connected to others.

Kobo is using this data not just for enhancing the merchandising, but also sending reminder emails to customers who are currently reading or have recently completed reading a book that’s identified as part of a series.

Below is a sample email derived automatically from a reader’s catalog of titles.

There are plenty of other feature spots that we are highlighting indie author published titles within.

One of them is the permanent FREE EBOOKS landing page – conversion here works best with series books; offering the first one for free (which you can do through Kobo Writing Life for as long as you want) and enticing customers into the next books in that series.

Other merchandising spots are KOBO NEXT and KOBO NEXT GREAT DEALS (typically $4.99 and under)

Kobo also runs monthly discount “publisher sponsored” features in which authors allow us to discount their titles to customers using a coupon code. In them, the publisher then gets paid 70% off the discounted price. Here’s an example of one that ran in mid June 15, 2015.

But what I’m most excited to share is that we are building in the opportunity for authors to be considered for various promotions like these directly within Kobo Writing Life. An easy way to think about it perhaps is as a “BookBub Built Right into Kobo Writing Life” – meaning that when promotional opportunity comes available, if your book already has the right price point, is in the right category and available in the right territory, you’d see if it was eligible for a forthcoming promo and, within just a few clicks, submit the title for consideration. We’re pretty excited at how this will open up the ability for authors to be included in various promos that we continually run throughout the year.

To take full advantage of this promotion, you’ll need to be signed up for Kobo Writing Life – your directly published titles will be the ones eligible for the various promotions that we are already starting to schedule as much as 2 or more months in advance.

Some other things you can do to assist with getting noticed on Kobo include:

Attending events and networking and liaising with other authors and industry folks. Even if you aren’t at an event that a Kobo person is at, you might end up making a connection of a connection – it’s a small industry and authors are fantastic at helping one another. There are easily dozens of authors that have been introduced to me through authors I already know.

Publish directly to Kobo Writing Life rather than coming in through a data aggregator. We are constantly sifting through new titles entered into our database, always looking for that next “hidden gem” that we can spotlight for our customers.

Pricing. Where 99 cent novels seem to be the way to go on Kindle, Kobo doesn’t use books as a “loss leader” – eBooks are the ONLY thing we sell, and our prime real estate needs to be dedicated to books that we can actually earn money on. Imagine that we have the choice to feature one of two great fantasy novels. One is 99 cents and the other is 9.99. Remembering that Kobo keeps 30%, which one do you think is a more sustainable title for us to spend time featuring?

Mark Leslie Lefebvre Bio: Mark Leslie Lefebvre is the Director of Self-Publishing and Author Relations at Kobo. He was hired by Kobo in 2011 to make it easier for indie authors and small publishers to get their work published to Kobo’s global catalog (which is available in 190 countries). Mark and his team launched Kobo Writing Life in July of 2012 and it now represents between 10 and 18% of Kobo’s weekly unit sales, larger than any of the major publishers. Mark is also the author of speculative fiction and Twilight Zone styled horror under the name Mark Leslie. His latest books include Tomes of Terror: Haunted Bookstores and Libraries and I, Death.