More Tips on Writing a Series and a Guest Blog at SMP Authors

We’ve been sharing tips about writing a series, and today we have more tips. Also, we are guest blogging today at  the SMP Author Blog about writing a series with even more series tips. Last week we shared three tips we’ve learned about writing a series. Today’s tips are:

• Be sure to update your plot charts, timelines, character charts, and world notes as you go along. Hunting for changes you’ve made–and trust us, you will make them–after the book is written, or published, can be tedious.
• Don’t worry about finishing the entire series until you have a contract. The first book is the one authors are  passionate about, and having that one written makes doing the next one easier when you do sell. Writing book two tells us we can, indeed, manage a series. When we started The Turning Stone Chronicles series, we decided to finish our first book and work on book two while we tried to sell  book one  If we couldn’t sell the series, then we were going to scrap the idea and move on to something else. That way we wouldn’t waste all that time on a defunct idea.

For more tips on writing a series, follow this link to our SMP Author Blog where you’ll find five additional tips from us, posted  today, about writing a series.

Do you have anymore tips you’d like to share?

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Three Tips for Writing a Series

As you probably know The Promised One, the first book of our Turning Stone Chronicles paranormal romance series released this week, so we thought it would be a great time to talk about writing a series. The Turning Stone Chronicles is the first series we have attempted and along the way we’ve gleaned some tips we thought helpful. We’d like to share three of them on our blog today.

• Make sure each book in the series stands alone. There’s nothing more frustrating than reading the second book in a series before you’ve read the first and finding that the book leaves you full of unanswered questions. Readers want to pick up a book that leaves them satisfied when they come to the last page. Yes, they may be so taken by the world, the characters, or the author’s voice that they want to read more. But if you leave them muttering, “What the heck?” they may not want to pick up anything else you write.
• Don’t do an info dump to catch the reader up with what happened in the previous books. Consider the previous book as back story of each new book . Weave it into the story as you would if the book were a single title.
• Decide if your over arching characters are going to change throughout the book series or remain the same.  Young Harry Potter, whose Muggle guardians beat him down emotionally, spends his time throughout the Harry Potter series growing and changing into a confident man. Whereas Ian Fleming’s James Bond never changes. He’s the consummate playboy and spy. Knowing where you want your character to go, and grow, is important.

Series are popular with editors and with readers, and they can be fun to write. Just be sure you’re prepared to either go the distance or scrap the idea if it doesn’t sell. We’ll be back next week with a couple more tips for writing series, and a link to the SMP Authors blog where we will be discussing this subject in more depth.

Have you ever considered writing a series?

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