For Writers

The 3 P’s of a Successful Series Writer

January 10, 2018 By K. D. McAdams

Should you invest in writing a series?

Aspiring authors face an overabundance of advice. From what genre to write in to how fast to write there is an expert recommendation at every turn. One of the most common suggestions for success in the author business is to write in a series.

If you just started writing your first novel and you come across this advice it might seem overwhelming “I’m struggling to write one novel and they’re telling me I need to write at least 3?”

Maybe you’ve already written a series and it’s available for sale but not doing as well as you would like. You have a great new story idea, but you’re wondering if you can really invest in creating a new series only to have it not earn back what you put in.

If you’re like me, you have a few series out and they are profitable, but you want more. You have a great new idea but you’re really thinking about return on investment. Will this new series be profitable enough to make it worth the work?

Make no mistake, writing a series is an investment.

Series writers invest time, money, and energy. Regardless of how many words you can write in a week it will take months or years for the average writer to create a successful series.

On top of this major investment there are no guarantees. No one owes you a living. Even if you did everything the experts say and poured your blood, sweat and tears into your series it might not sell. This point cannot be overemphasized, no one can promise you financial success in return for your investment in writing a series.

But there are ways to improve the odds.

The three P’s of a successful series writer

A successful series writer has three key traits – planning, persistence, and passion.

Planning

A successful series writer plans – Writers tend to fall onto a spectrum between pantsing and plotting. It doesn’t matter how you write an individual book, if you want to be a successful series writer you need to start with a plan.

A plan helps you to develop a story big enough to tell over multiple books, engage with readers throughout the process and keep you on track when the going gets tough.

Some writers hear the word plan and think it’s taking the art out of the process. It’s not. Your story and each of your books are still creative works of art. You can even pants writing each novel.

A plan is a tool for setting expectations with your readers and preparing them to buy your art once it is ready for consumption

Persistence

A successful series writer is persistent – Creating a series takes time. Some of the steps will be laborious. Some days you’ll wonder when you are going to see results. You cannot give up.

Be patient. If you put in the work, results will come. If you set to it every day, and follow your plan good things will happen. Writing a novel takes weeks, months, even years. Planning, writing and selling a multi-book series takes time, don’t rush it.

There will be days when you don’t want to write, days when you think your plan and writing is crap and days when you feel like a complete imposter. We all have those days. The days when you don’t want to write are the most important days to sit down and write.

Bad copy can be edited, revised, and improved while nothing can fix a lack of content.

If you don’t keep at it, your plan will be wasted, your patience will be shot and worst of all, your story will never get out into the world. Power through your doubt and keep working. It will be worth it.

Passion

A successful series writer is passionate – If you love your story, readers will see it. When readers feel the passion in your words they are more likely to stay engaged.

This series is going to be with you for the rest of your life. Family, friends, and strangers are going to ask you questions about it. Is your series something that lights your fire and makes you want to engage in discussion with others? It better be.

If you want others to love your work, you need to love it first and always.

There will be social media debates about your characters and setting. You’ll get good reviews and horribly critical reviews. The best way to keep moving forward in the face of criticism is to love what you are doing so much it drowns out the negative. Unfaltering love of your story will keep you going when anyone else would tune out and shut down.

Join me as I take an idea and build it into a successful series

Over the last 5 years I’ve completed 2 series with 6 books each. All started from a single-story idea and grew after the first novel was written. While I love the stories and the process, I made plenty of mistakes while writing and publishing over 750,000 words.

In an effort to learn from these mistakes and create a new successful series that readers will love I’ve developed a plan for growing my newest idea from a tiny seed into a multi-product series. Join me on this journey and I’ll share my process and plan with you.

Like a good story this adventure is bound to have twists and turns, ups and downs, action and suspense. I can’t promise it will be easy but I will be here with you, sharing the good with the bad.

Along the way, I want to help you plan, write, and sell a profitable series. If you’re working on a series of your own I want to hear about it. Tell me your struggles and successes, ask me questions and share your doubts.

How I turned a single book idea into a 6 book series (Twice)

January 3, 2018 By K. D. McAdams

So you’ve written your first novel, way to go! It’s a major accomplishment you should be proud of yourself.

But now that you’ve made it through that challenge you see that conventional wisdom recommends writing in a series. What do you do next?

This is exactly what happened to me.

My first book, Annihilation, was a story I had been going over in my head for years. It was actually something I made up to help me fall asleep at night. When my brain was creating fiction I couldn’t stress and obsess over the laundry list of tasks on my plate. The characters were basically my family (with plenty of embellishments) and I loved that story.

But it was just one story.

Initially it was written just for me. But once the words were down and I shared it with my wife and a few other people I was encouraged to-

Get an editor
Explore self publishing

The story went through several rounds of editing and proof reading (the manuscript was on it’s 20th iteration before I started laying out the ebook) while I researched indie publishing. My research showed that publishing a book was possible by yourself, but the best success came to those who were writing in a series.

Of course writing in a series makes sense. If a reader likes your first book it’s a lot less work to convince them to buy the next one. The problem I faced was how to turn this one story into a series.

How do I go from “A teen genius discovers dark energy” the concept of my book, to “A rag tag group of humans survive the apocalypse and venture off into space” the concept I had for a series?

In order to move from a book to a series I had to grow my world. That meant I had to stop thinking about the main character and start thinking about all the characters. Looking at his story and where he was headed, wasn’t enough, I needed to understand where he came from and what the back story looked like. I kept digging down on the why and what of how this one story came to be.

The bad news is that you have to ask yourself lots of questions. The good news is that you’re writing fiction so you can make up all the answers!

I started asking about Seamus’ youth. Did he discover dark energy and invent his reactor overnight? No.

Did he learn from anyone else? Yes.

If he was learning about something so powerful from other people was it possible that no one knew who he was? No.

If people knew about Seamus and his genius would the government leave him alone? No, something this powerful could be weaponized.

Was there anyone in his life that could have a big secret from him? Yes, his mother traveled often for business and had their families best interests in mind.

The world of my story grew. This teen genius was working with incredibly powerful technology, but not trying to hide it. Leading scientists and the government were watching and helping him. His mother wanted to keep the family safe so she was willing to make a deal when the secret agents approached her.

My initial story had a main character and a supporting cast. Now I had multiple characters with their own motivations and goals. I also had a conspiracy that involved Seamus’ mother and secret agents. If she wanted to keep the family safe, there had to be a threat.

The apocalypse, which was mysterious when I started writing the book, became a government plot. While it was too late for my characters to go back and stop the plot I could go forward. A plot audacious enough to wipe out life on Earth had to have an equally remarkable contingency plan.

Ideas for the next four books came to me quickly. The survivors from Book 1 have to evacuate the planet book 2, colonize a new planet book 3, deal with aliens already living on their new world book 4 and then grow into their new setting book 5.

While I was planning book 2 I realized that there was a book 6 that capped it off. These humans could not have been able to survive completely by accident. There had to be some justification for humans being able to planet hop, even if it seemed like a miracle.

Because I’m a slow learner my second series, Dylan Cold, started out in a similar fashion. I decided to write a book for a concept that I had thought about for a while. But again it was just one book. Fortunately I was only half way through when I realized I needed to expand some of the pieces if I wanted a series.

In this case my characters back story was already detailed and held no room for conspiracies. To come up with a series I needed to look forward. If Dylan survived the predicament faced in Book 1, how was his life going to change? Did the events from book 1 make him different or just highlight the real Dylan?

This series could explore Dylans struggle to become himself. But there needed to be some conflict. To find this conflict I built out the other characters so that they would have goals and needs that might cause Dylan to make concessions to what he wanted.

The back and forth Dylan was about to experience could be played out over several novels. As these are thriller novels, I determined his character struggle first and then fit a crime around it. This series has 6 books so far, but there is no telling how many adventures Dylan Cold may undertake.

If you’ve written a book and are now struggling to turn it into a series don’t fear, it can be done. Get deep into multiple characters and ask lots of questions about their world. Chances are if these characters were involved in an interesting story once, they will get into more trouble that’s worth writing about.