Planning a Book Series | Tips, Tricks & Warnings!

hello everyone i'm alexa dunn and today we are going to be talking about writing a series now i've had this topic requested a ton of times and honestly i put it off because if you couldn't tell i don't write series i write standalones though two of my books are companion novels so we are going to touch on that a bit the concept of the series of standalones in a shared universe though i know when you guys ask me for tips on how to write series you mean one of those big series that you plan ahead

and you have a ton of books and you become that author i'm going to try to cover a lot of ground here from how series perform in traditional publishing and kind of why more of us tend to write standalones now a days as well as those alternate approaches to series that are necessarily those big grand pre-planned ones pros and cons of writing series and then those different ways to approach writing a series and practical hopefully specific tips on what you have to take into consideration what you have to plan for and kind of like little

cheats for hopefully how to do them well as always lots of time stamps down below to break down what is going to be a pretty meaty video and so i write standalones now technically because i'm writing in genres and areas that support standalones quite well i have attempted to write series in the past i have done series planning in the past so i am going to be drawing on that the first two books i wrote which weren't published were both planned as a series as both as trilogies in fact though i think if i'd actually

ended up writing them the first one might have ended up being a duology we're also going to talk about that kind of like seven book series versus trilogy versus duology and some of the practicalities uh but my second one i was all in on that one and that was supposed to be a really meaty pre-planned trilogy so let's start with the state of traditional publishing and how series perform traditional publishing as always i go a bit heavy on the ya side because that is my experience and as a reader you've probably noticed a serious decline

in series and why a it used to be you could burp and get a trilogy deal and that just isn't the case anymore usually at best it's possible to sell a duology that's definitely something that happens but it's just simply easier in traditional publishing to sell a standalone and that has been the case for a long time so part of the cheat slash trick here is to write something that yes you want to have be a series but to ensure that that first book truly and satisfyingly stands alone so that when you query it you

can say the magic words which are it is a standalone with series potential so then it comes down to the agent if they want to offer and represent you and then selling it to take the next steps of pitching it as a series or not pitching it as a series generally speaking everyone loves more of a successful thing so it's good to have the series potential but what you don't want to do is have something that doesn't work unless it is a series because yes that's flat out just harder to sell and then generally there

are a ton of genres in chat pub and self that just don't support series as much or don't support the kind of series that most people think of with series which is one big story told over multiple books again i'm going to talk about different ways to approach series and these are the ones that are going to work more in some of the genres you don't think of as serious supporting genres like thriller or romance though romance definitely has subtype series but that's the main thing with tradpub eight times out of ten you don't want

to go barrel in with i'm writing a series that has to be series nothing but series series or bust because that can actually work against you you need to be a lot more open you need to develop that skill of taking something to give it serious potential but make sure that it stands on its own let's start with the pros of writing a series why you might want to write a book series you have the opportunity to build an extensive world and cast of characters and really explore a story something that you create over multiple

books we enjoy that as writers and readers like it too series can land huge with readers you have a break out potential with a series that doesn't exist in quite the same way with standalones and so it's attractive to many of us like we want to have that magic moment series book series can support fandoms in a way that stand alones tend not to and to that end you can make buffo bucks off of the successful book series it just kind of snowballs and escalates and it's like haha yay good things all around and then

in particular in self-publishing one of the major pros of a series i mean generally front list sells backlists so the more books you have new books you have the more you're going to build and sell previous books but especially in self-publishing where you can control your schedule if you have a whole series if you finish it ahead of time you can publish it maybe a new book every three months you can satisfy that voracious readership and series readers do tend to be voracious but what are the cons of writing a series and this kind of

speaks to some of the reasons they don't aren't as popular in traditional publishing or parts of traditional publishing as maybe they used to be so just as often as a series can take off a series can also bomb and fall flat on its face you can release this first book of a series too much fanfare and it doesn't really go anywhere it doesn't pick up or build that readership then all of a sudden you're locked into two or three or more books that have just diminishing returns you're not picking up a readership and you've spent

years and years and years on a series that just doesn't go anywhere to that end specific to traditional publishing a con can be you can sell the first or second book in a series and the series can be cancelled going forward i know that's a big fear for a lot of people there are situations where with great agent representation and good contracts you can get your rights reverted to you so you can finish publishing the series and self-publishing uh but just like it's a con series can peter out series can be cancelled as i already

mentioned series are simply harder to sell in traditional publishing the bigger planned your series is the harder it is to sell the less likely it is that it is going to sell another con that you do have to think of by locking yourself into a series what happens if you lose passion for that series that does happen but you are obligated to finish something and it can actually end up being a real kind of drudgery it's something that can happen another just thing that can happen a con some readers don't trust series they kind of

will hold back and wait for a series to finish before checking it out and sometimes that can actually mean they kind of push it to the side and think i'll go to it later and they never get to it at all that's gonna depend on readership habits but similarly even if they read your book one it's actually notorious to have readership fall off for a series book one is almost always going to have the most readership and so it's series can often just be diminishing returns which i think is another reason why they have petered

out so much in certain areas of traditional publishing certainly in y a but hey we're here to talk about writing series so let's get back on track away from those cons but thanks to two one things to consider so i want to talk about four basic ways that you can approach a series you're gonna see that these have kind of varying definitions the first one is the most intense the first one has the most planning and tips to it and that is the very basic you have a big world with a big bad slash conflict

that carries over multiple books and you're building toward a big finish and i'm going to come back to that but just to give you a preview of the other ones i'm going to go over once i've gone come back and gone through that one uh an anchor character who goes on multiple adventures in the same world but this is like detective fiction for example or like the dresden files then there's also connected standalones where a series is a shared universe this is something that i have done this can definitely also be great if you weren't

planning to write a series but something takes off and you want to do one and then kind of like a cousin to that uh reverse pov companion novels that's something that can be tacked on later when a first book is really really popular that fans that readership likes and technically that counts as a series though usually they cap off at doing the reverse pov but it's very popular especially in romance but back to the big one so these sorts of big series that are usually i mean it's best to pre-plan them because when you have

something that carries over multiple books that is building to multiple books i hope you know what it is ahead of time these can be duologies these could be trilogies those are the most common and popular right now certainly in why a fiction but in many other categories and genres as well or those kind of big sprawling ones you know the escalating four five six seven book series something like harry potter or percy jackson game of thrones will it ever be finished no one knows and as i mentioned these are the unicorn series they're hard to

do but darn if the payoff isn't amazing if one of these does well and breaks out the thing with these sorts of series is you have to be a master of conflict and by the way i keep mentioning planning it doesn't mean that pantsers can't write these sorts of things but it does usually mean you have to finish book one before you can plan the rest if you are a pantser at least i found that when i was planning a trilogy i started developing that once the first book was done and i was revising it

and i revised it with a series plan in mind so outliners are going to be planning these big spelling series ahead of time pantsers you have to do it eventually rev when you're revising the first book is smart before something is published so you're a master of conflict and the reason for this is you are going to be layering conflict on conflict on conflict on conflict you have to have the big conflict this spans the entire series this is what your entire series is building toward but then every single book within your series has to

have a juicy and compelling enough conflict for people to want to read those books so that they stand alone every book in a series should both stand alone within reason once you get into the middle of series it gets a little different but certainly the first one and they have to build on each other it should be increasingly satisfying as your reader reads each one but they should justify their own existence essentially by having a meaty enough conflict to carry that book which means you need to learn all about structure about three-act structure because your

standalone books need to follow or whatever structure you choose but they have to follow that structure and deliver that conflict and those stakes and the building in the building and character arcs every book has to have its own character arc but it also has to layer into the overarching character arc of that main character over a book series a little later i'm gonna talk about some pitfalls that some series can fall into and like spoiler it's often a failure of properly accomplishing character arcs that does this but think about conflict on a micro and a

macro level within let's focus on first books within the first book you need a conflict that feels macro as the reader is reading it but then in the grand scheme of your series is actually a micro conflict but it can't be so micro that it's not interesting and what you have to think about is how to subvert the solutions to your conflict essentially at the end of the book so let's say your book one conflict is someone has been murdered and the main character enters this brand new world learns new things challenges things about themselves

truths they thought they knew they go on an interesting emotional journey and at the end they solve the murder they find the bad guy whatever the bad guy or thing is there is a satisfying conclusion of solving the thing but then in order to support a larger series you need a subversion on that solution that doesn't undermine the satisfaction of the conclusion this is where it gets hard you don't want the reader to feel cheated you want them to be intrigued to go oh wait this is the bigger picture and then they see the bigger

picture that the series is going to build toward oh that guy was the killer but actually he's part of a much bigger conspiracy oh what is what is the conspiracy really how deep does it go who is at the top and how is this going to personally impact this character what's going to happen next if you've watched any of my thriller videos i've talked about how building tension and kind of satisfying character arcs and kind of pacing it's asking and answering questions constantly you're gonna do that you'll be asking and answering interesting questions in that

first series book and then you gotta hit them in the face with such a compelling what if or what is secret question at the end that they are compelled to read the whole series sometimes that can be as simple as what's actually going on this was a tactic used in a ton of those dystopian series that we all read it was like peeling an onion book one was well you thought this peeling of the onion was it but no wait there's more we have to go deeper and part of how this is often well accomplished

in a series this is my next tip you have to really think about your pov character the lens through which you tell the story is incredibly important for a series because usually to get the most out of your tension and conflict is to pick a character who knows the least or who is going to be greatly impacted by whatever the big bad is so that you can have high layered building emotional stakes and all of this shouldn't be revealed in book one that's the other thing you have to learn how to pull your punches never

blow your wad so to speak on your main character's backstory trauma etc in book one this is a good tip for any of the ones we're gonna talk about especially the anchor series the character anchor series i'm gonna talk about but this is because if you've got a really good twist that can hit maybe it hits in book two at the end of book two because it's the big crux thing that's gonna push us into the confrontation at the end of book three don't drop it in book one you might wanna hint it in book

one so these could be examples like there's a conspiracy and an organization and there's someone at the head of that organization and it's not a big bad dude it's a woman and is it their long lost mom dun dun dun i mean these are horrible examples but you know what i mean think about your favorite series and how they pulled you in how they threaded you along the escalation of twists and that they weren't just twists but that they increasingly were more personal to that main character and you were invested in whoever that main character

was or cast to characters because this can work in multi-pov third-person books as well in fact many series support multi-pov incredibly well and that's the thing consider how do these characters interconnect how do they interact if you're showing different parts of a world or exploring different aspects of your big world and your big conflict in multiple books how are they going to eventually converge you need to think about this you need to set this up you have to plan for these satisfying moments that are gonna come later in the series and ensure that they are

built up in the earlier ones at the same time while crafting beautiful conflict-filled standalone books that are compelling enough to read by themselves it really is a lot of work to do and a last note on kind of thinking about character and thinking about this as you plan out your series whether you're doing it all ahead of time or you do this once you've kind of figured out a first book i would have whatever the final showdown is in mind for your entire series it doesn't have to be like it will take place here and

this is what they will say to each other but you should have some idea of emotional stakes resonance and the weight of whatever the final choice is whatever the final choice is that's gonna be a big thing in the final book of your series it should play off of the arc that you have in the very first book where your character starts with their wants their needs the lie that they tell themselves whatever growth they experience in that first book with the final showdown choice etc it either has to satisfy something kind of from that

want need and be like cathartic and poetic it can go against something it could be a choice that they never thought they had to make that will be emotionally devastating for the reader on some level but satisfying in terms of representing a growth arc because then your work going backwards moving through a series is to develop your character book by book so whatever the final choice big moment is that it makes sense that it's supported and even if you'll piss off some readers that the majority of readers are going to get some kind of emotional

satisfaction out of your big grand conclusion now bouncing back to conflict for a moment a warning i do want to give you when you're planning this kind of really big series is not to save all of your best stuff for the end because you run the risk of not having enough interesting stuff going on in earlier books and if you can't sell the first one what are you going to do with the rest so sometimes this will mean if you have something planning you're like oh but the good thing is here and it has to

be here think about restructuring is it because you're planning it as a trilogy and you've basically stuck yourself with bridge book syndrome which is where a lot of stuff happens in book one very little happens in book two because it only exists to push the characters to book three maybe reevaluate as a duology in some extreme cases you could be planning a series and it turns out you should be writing a standalone if your big thing is so big but you're gonna expect readers to read three books to get there maybe you should condense everything

and put it all into one book or it's just you have to do more work to make the conflict stakes and twists of the earlier books just as interesting and as compelling so that you can save the best for last essentially honestly these kinds of series are a ton of work they're hard they're not easy tread carefully planning a series and writing a series can be a ton of fun but if you are overwhelmed or you don't feel ready there is nothing wrong with learning to write a satisfying standalone because next i'm going to talk

about the kind of series where you can basically backdoor them into series these are great ways to take something that works that is successful and turn them into a series that require more planning than others so the next type that i teach is anchoring a character into a series of adventures so these are ones where it's not like every single book is building to a big bad though these can i know you're like why are you doing this to me but the idea is that you build a central character who inhabits a very specific world

where something in your conceit makes it easy for you to write multiple books that can essentially feel like standalones that can be read as standalones can be read out of order or in order reader's choice because it's all about the character and all of the adventures that they go on often of course these are best read in order by the way but i just want to throw that out because there are some especially in like detective fiction where sometimes you can read them out of context or out of order and that's the thing these are

going to work really really well they're they tend to be occupationally specific these work in genres where you can give your character an occupation where they have a reason to basically have a case of the week or a case of the book so detective fiction mysteries like those subtypes fantasy i mentioned the dresden files great example he's a private investigator see detectives again journalist characters can make really good anchor characters in series um there's something like thursday next one of my all-time favorite series she's a literary detective like she gets a job in the book

world and that kind of becomes the thread that there's like always something different and crazy happening or like think about certain kinds of academics or niche skill that can bring up different adventures think about dan brown and his robert langdon books he is a symbologist and i guess this gives him a reason to go on lots of different adventures so think about whatever conceit you can come up with a character-based conceit that would give you a reason to write more than one adventure with that character so as i mentioned in the big series tip my

biggest tip here is not to blow your wad on everything interesting and compelling about your character in the first book because these sorts of character anchor series are all about you get to grow a character over multiple books you get to everyone expects it later in the series by the way this is like a classic for a reason where you in book four or five there's some deeply personal case something that happens where it it basically picks at a deep trauma or truth or secret that this beloved main character has and you get to do

some really fun things with character growth in those sorts of books so you don't want to reveal all of that in book one if you have pre-planned you can drop hints but you don't want to like let it all out by the way you still want them to grow in book one but it's a little less critical for them to have a drastic growth arc because you know it's not a standalone you want just enough so that it's compelling but not enough that kind of you're done with the character or the world so the next

kind of series are connected standalones you can plan for these but these are fantastic because they work great when you write a standalone and it does really well or you fall in love with the world and you're like how can i return to this but it doesn't really support a sequel connected standalones baby some can be more connected than others a good example is marissa meyer's series those do build on each other but they still function as standalones and they feel like companion novels but they're all set in the same universe and that's what's great

about connected universe stories because you did all that work to set up a world and you can actually push and prod and play with that world in really fun ways by coming up with new characters to follow with new conflicts and new stories another good example of this is sanji menon's books those are romances which typically don't have series or sequels but she did the connected universe tack where each one focuses on a different person but she gets to bury fun little easter eggs and that's what's fun about connected universe stories because it's actually all

about those easter eggs you're not religiously rehashing everything that happened in a previous book because that's not expected in a connected standalone you want to explore new things by whatever new character that you have chosen new reflections on the world another way of doing this is you can go in the past or in the future it can be super fun and it depends on the genre again but to explore like oh the thing that happened 30 years ago either in the past or in the present this can work very very well in kind of mystery

genres of like well we solved this but then hmm something else bad happened here maybe we're gonna look into it or you can jump to the future these are the kind of theories that play on a reader's love of the general world that you built and of course some aspects of those characters from the first book but unlike a character anchor series it's not following the same character in every single book it's essentially relying a little more heavily on the world and poking at different aspects of that world by finding a completely new lens for

a new story now these unlike those character anchor ones can definitely be read out of order and often you should expect they will be read out of order so don't rely too heavily on like they know they must read them in this order connected universe stories uh often will be read out of order it kind of depends on the genre in contemporaries for sure and fantasy maybe less so now my tip for easter eggs this is going to be easier if you are self-published because i mean one of the tips i'm going to say is

you probably are writing a lot of this series before you publish it if you're self-publishing harder in traditional publishing so in traditional publishing usually the only kind of overlap you're gonna have if you do sell a first book you might be in the final editing stages of that first book when you were writing the second book i ended up in this situation and so at the very last stages of editing my first book i was able to insert easter eggs that had come up in writing the second book now if this series goes to a

third book at this juncture it won't but let's say i did i can't go back and edit the first two books to add easter eggs that come up in book three so once you kind of get to that point you can still add easter eggs but they're of things that already exist but whenever possible my tip with easter eggs is if the first book isn't published yet and you can kind of connect the ones definitely do it because that's part of the joy for the readership or though maybe you're a planner and you have planned

this all ahead of time but i didn't and then i mentioned reverse pov companions as i said these do very very well in romance and also some fantasy but especially fantasy romance and these usually aren't pre-planned because you find that you've released a book and people really like it especially if they're super into a couple doing a reverse is just it's great for fans to be honest there's a reason stephanie meyer did this and that they were enormously successful or i guess kind of similarly it's like the companion novel thing before but also what suzanne

collins did with the hunger games you take an unexpected character and you add kind of texture to the books that came before by writing a new story from a new pov so i want to leave you with some hot tips and considerations to bear in mind if you are approaching writing a series so first if you are traditionally published planning traditionally publish want to be traditionally published big bullhorn shouting do not write your entire series ahead of time don't do this it is a waste of your time and you are setting yourself up for disappointment

the reason for this is you don't even know if you can sell that first book you don't know if an agent is going to sign it and in a best case scenario let's say you do sign with an agent you do sell your book they're going to want you to edit it and it's very very likely you're going to end up doing developmental edits that will make your book stronger because you're doing traditional publishing because you're not afraid of developmental edits that may have ripples for the rest of the series you're just creating extra work

for yourself because you might have to end up throwing out an entire book if you've already read it or at best do major rewrites but also because you will grow every single time you write a book and you will grow through the process of being professionally published so why would you want to have staler writing you should want to go into the subsequent books of a series that has been picked up and you've done a ton of editing work on fresh with your newly developed skills so that every single book is better than the last

now i'm going to give you opposite advice if you are self-publishing if you are self-publishing right as much of your series as possible ahead of time this is because self-publishing supports quick releasing and in fact it can really help you build momentum for your series if you do release them pretty tight to each other you can make lots of different decisions with the timeline it could be they are released six months apart nine months apart tighter three months a year apart is fine but at that point it's very similar to traditional publishing i say take

advantage of being self-published by doing a little bit tighter but yeah write it ahead of time you could edit it all in one go too but at least write or fast draft a majority of the series ahead of time so that you know where it's going but so that you can basically hit those publishing deadlines as quickly as possible this is also going to help you with things like cover development and so my next tip is again for self-publishing because in triad pub this is a little out of your control but in self-publishing it's in

your control you definitely want to make sure that your series has uniform cover branding what's great about writing a lot of this ahead of time and deciding on your book titles ahead of time which tip for that in a second is you could hire a cover designer and have them do multiple covers at once you can get bulk discounts by doing that but also know that like you booked someone and secured their time and they're not going to become busy or maybe even stop making covers by the time you get to your next book so

just it's kind of smart to get a ton of that stuff done ahead of time but make sure that your series covers go together they make sense so that if a reader sees book three they go oh that must be part of this series just by looking at them so the next tip is book titles i mentioned this in my book titles video as well it's for self-published and traditionally published authors self-published authors have a little more control because ultimately the titles are up to you but trap hub authors will often have to brainstorm and

submit titles to their publisher think about series titling you can have a title for the series overall and then each individual book in the series they should go together in terms of kind of word choice and formatting i will link down below to that entire very long video untitling your book coming up with book titles but for series i think it's really important to make sure that they go together because it's another branding signal in conjunction with the cover that's gonna signal to a reader that these go together so on to those pitfalls i warned

you about so the first is bridge book syndrome this happens most often with trilogies and i think is a large reason that trilogies went out of fashion in y.a because this happens so often bridge book syndrome is when you read the second book in a trilogy and nothing really happens and this is why so often there's a huge falloff in series because a bad bridge book can actually kill momentum for the whole series and many people don't even bother to read the third book and as i mentioned this is when you basically save all the

good stuff for book one and book three and in book two the characters are kind of spinning their wheels nothing particularly interesting happens and it's like you're biding time the thing is the things that happen between them need to happen and you have two choices you can either figure out how to revise that three book idea into a do a compact duology this is gonna mean kind of moving some of your beats around however and how the conflict kind of works because each one's gonna have to fit into three act structure pacing can be a

huge concern but it also can sometimes mean you gotta work a lot harder to give book two a proper plot a smart way to do this is to think about leaning into what worked in book one what were the tropes or structural things that really worked that pulled readers in and how can you escalate them two of my favorite examples of book twos that like really worked the wicked king and catching fire the wicked king specifically escalated on the hate to love tropes and threw in some baller twists also put new tropes into the blender

tropes that were high conflict i'm not gonna spoil you but if you've read it you will be familiar high conflict compelling tropes that build off of whatever readers loved about the first one that it's interesting enough to stand on its own but still feeds into what you are building toward in book three and catching fire very very brilliant returned to the formula of book one making it different enough that it provided new challenges to the characters to provoke further growth arcs because it had to have the growth arc to push the character to the inevitable

conclusion of book three and there are mixed feelings about that as a trilogy period some people don't like mockingjay and at the time i definitely didn't like it but hey let's say you don't like mockingjay and you just want to put it aside the hunger games and catching fire work really really well as a duology catching fire is simply a great sequel because it gives you a little bit of what you loved but just different enough to escalate the tension and the stakes so the other pitfall just to warn you about this really comes mostly

in longer series but i call it same different story so this is that phenomenon where you're you're deep into a series you're four or five books in and it just feels like there's nowhere else for the character to go there's nowhere else really for this the world to go i find it most often happens when they've had a lot of growth arcs in the previous books and now they're just they either have everything they want or they're super powered like they're so strong and good that it basically saps all of the stakes out of the

story because of course everything's going to be okay some ways to fix this are to throw a real wrench in the works and like reboot the series essentially but this sometimes can also really upset your readership and kind of ruin things so there's kind of this fine line between like making sure it doesn't feel like you're reading the same book over and over again which happens because the characters no longer grow or change and completely changing the status quo to the point where you lose your core readership try carefully here if you do end up

kind of in that kind of territory yeah i don't want to spoil books that have made interesting choices some do it better than others sometimes a hard reboot works and sometimes a hard reboot doesn't but essentially this happens because your characters have become stagnant so you have a character problem and my last kind of tip is for you plotters out there for you outliners be very wary of planning so much and getting so into brainstorming and world building and character development in this whole big series and all the stuff i told you needs a lot

of planning but be careful doing so much of that that you never write the series that you never start the series this is a huge pitfall of writing series that i find a ton of people fall into they'll plan and plan and plan and plan for five six seven more years and they don't ever actually write the series the other pitfall of this the longer you plan it is that it can actually get really stale by the time you write it you're writing seven year old ideas and maybe your ideas seven years ago aren't as

sophisticated as they are now because hopefully you've developed as a storyteller but you're so married to whatever that thing is that is really baked into it that you kind of get stuck so just be wary a very long incubation periods of epic series sometimes i feel it's best to do enough planning it can take a few years of percolation and incubation and development and planning but it's a certain point let's let's say if you're getting into two years maybe just try writing the first book because as i mentioned there's a lot of tweaking planning tightening

that you can do for a series once you've actually written the first one once you actually see how it works on the page that can propel you to improving the series and then actually finishing it but also don't forget if you're traditionally publishing you just have to write the first book like like baby steps so that is a bit of a primer on writing series i know there will probably be a lot of questions for this especially those big series they are legitimately the hardest ones i advise you do a lot of studying on story

structure that you read a lot of series and like pay attention to what they do well why and how and give this video a thumbs up if you like it i will make more of these kind of like nitty gritty writing type of videos and if you're not are subscribed to the channel go ahead and do that i post new videos two to three times a week as always guys thank you so much for watching and happy writing