how to start a book & series
Reader NF asks:
“How do you start a book or better yet!? How do you start a series?”
For a book, I typically start by writing a synopsis of the book, which includes the climactic scenes, emotional high points, story beats, and so on. Then I divided it up into a suitable number of chapters and start writing. I should note that before I actually outline a book I tend to have been thinking about it for a few months already.
Like, I wrote the outline for CLOAK OF DRAGONS a few days ago, but I’ve been thinking about it since last summer, so I had mostly worked it out in my head already. It was just a matter of writing down a synopsis and getting it organized before I started out.
Outlining a series is a bit more work, but not unduly so. Usually I write a thumbnail sketch of the series and its arc, and then I divide it up into the number of books. Then I write a thumbnail sketch of each individual book, which focuses on the main events that each book has to hit. Like, “Ridmark meets X”, or “Caina fights X for the first time”, or “Nadia finds out the truth about X”, that kind of thing.
Once the time comes to write the book, I’ll take the thumbnail sketch, expand it into a synopsis, and then make it into an outline with chapters.
Most of the time I’m pretty rigid about the number of books in a series I’ve planned out from the beginning. Like, I planned for twelve SEVENFOLD SWORD books, and so there are going to be twelve SEVENFOLD SWORD books, especially since the contract for the audiobooks is for twelve books, so changing that number would cause all kind of problems. I almost turned Chapter 22 of GHOST IN THE SEAL into its own book, but I decided that the concept would only sustain a chapter, not an entire book. So GHOST EXILE remained nine books.
The one exception was when I wrote CLOAK GAMES: MAGE FALL. The CLOAK GAMES series was supposed to be eleven books, but I decided that the series wouldn’t properly have an ending until Nadia and Lord Morvilind had come to some kind of resolution in their conflict. There aren’t any CLOAK GAMES audiobooks, but adding a book to the series was still a logistical challenge – I had to order another cover, GHOST IN THE AMULET and GHOST IN THE TOWER got delayed, and so on.
Anyway, that’s how I plan out books and series. The longer the series, the more planning that is necessary – I planned out the FROSTBORN series five year before I finished it in May of 2017.
-JM
I remember at this point a word from an editor who was grumbling that people were setting out to write series without remembering that you have to sell the first story as a story, not as a series opening. . . .
Indie only means you have to sell it to that many more people.
(Which is, of course, additional advice, on top of outlining it.)
Yes indeed. It’s why I focus most of my marketing efforts on the first book in a series. Hardly anyone will buy, say, the 4th one without first reading 1, 2 and 3.