I was reading Death of a Spy, the latest Hamish Macbeth1 book, which I will be reviewing next week, and it made me think about the whole business of writing a fiction series, what goes into making a series successful, and why write a series at all in the first place. (Perhaps worth noting that Death of a Spy is the thirty-seventh in M.C. Beaton’s Death series.)
If you’re a writer of fiction, and perhaps particularly if you’re a writer of romance or crime fiction, you will doubtless have been told that publishers really like a series. And the same is true in spades if you’re self-publishing genre fiction.
It’s understandable. With a new or fairly unknown writer, it’s likely to take readers a fair few bites of that particular authorial cherry before they decide they like the taste, and clamour for more. Stand-alones, as they are called in the trade, mean the reader having to start from fresh each time. Series gives them a familiar cast of characters to settle down with and to enjoy getting to know. It usually takes two or three books for an author to establish a following, and during that time you or your publisher may well be taking a larger or smaller financial hit. Hence the love of series to accelerate the whole getting-to-know-you process.Â
So, as a professional writer, when you’re setting out on a new fiction project, it’s always worth asking yourself - could this be a series? And if you answer yourself with a yes, or even a maybe, it’s worth taking steps from the start to make your life easier further down the track.
There are various things to consider. The first and most obvious is the cast of characters, followed in swift succession by the place or places in which your stories will be set, the times in which the action will take place, and, absolutely crucially, the story-arc of the series as a whole. Every author works in a different way, and every genre makes different demands, but there are some things which I would wholeheartedly recommend, things which, whether you are by nature a planner or a ‘pantser’, writing by the seat of your pants, will always make your life easier.
Say you’re thinking about a three-book series (of course, it may take off and you find yourself writing the other thirty four…). It’s helpful for you to have a solid core of characters who have a reason to be together and who you can make interact in interesting ways, a single place or places in which they can function, and challenges which they can face, either singly or as a group, which will show them developing and changing as the series goes on. You could do worse than look at the way J.K Rowling wrote the Harry Potter series. She always knew, right from the start, that there were only going to be seven books. She knew the main characters, and from very early on in the series she established the central challenge her characters were going to have to deal with.
Research is helpful, pictures of places and objects can give you support for providing substance and texture for your characters’ lives. And finally, getting the details right, and consistent, is, of course, fundamental. All of this needs documenting in some way, and keeping in mind from book to book. For this, I cannot recommend too strongly the fantastic Scrivener2 app developed by Literature and Latte - it’s a programme developed by writers for writers, and, although it does take a little time to get used to how it works, it is an absolute godsend for keeping track of everything while keeping your writing flowing. I would certainly recommend your checking it out.
What tips and tricks and pieces of kit have you found helpful when writing a series?
Death of a Spy, by M.C. Beaton and R.W. Green (Constable, 2024)