Something about series, the individual books of the series should be able to be read as a stand alone or it soon loses it’s appeal. The continuing characters have to show growth and change. Lois McMaster Bujold, J. A. Jance, Nora Roberts, P. N. Elrod, just to name a few of the writers I can think of offhand to illustrate who do it well.

Connected books to me are things like the Hometown Reunion books, my mother and I both enjoy those and have since we first were introduced to them. Again it only works if the writting is up to par, but recognizing a character from another book gives a sense of familiarty and that can be nice … if you liked the other book especially.

Stand Alones, now there you get the whole story at once and a feeling of completion at the end. Happily ever after of a sort.

As a reader I need different things at different times so it depends on what I’m in need of as to whether I choose to read a series or a stand alone at any particular time, they all have their place.

Again, this is one of the reasons why I like e-books. It’s possible to have available the entire backlist of an author when I run across someone I like and haven’t read before. I firmly believe this will eventually be of great assistance to midlist authors in particular. So often the word of mouth buzz that alerts me to a good writer or the finding of an old PB will be too late to find them again. They will have been dropped or their series cancelled due to lack of immediate sales.

At the time the book was accepted, I discussed all this with my publisher and was asked to go ahead and brand it as a series. I did so. However, I never at any point asked my readers to buy my book within a specific amount of time to insure the publication of future books, as some have falsely suggested. I do not even have that kind of power as an author. All by books are contracted on a book by book basis.

Also, just to clarify things, Avaron Dale did buy my book – she did not pass it over due to series branding, or any other reason. In fact, she appeared at the release day chat at Cobblestone Press to tell me she’d read the book in one sitting and loved it. She also made no bones about why she was there – she’d arrived there to pointedly ask me about the series, and if it would continue.

It was there I responded to her questions and told her I was not sure what I intended to do with the future of the Immortal Lovers series – I explained I had two other outlines penned – Eleni’s and Rubio’s, but no future plans for working on them at the moment. After all, I’d just released the first book, and I have another book I must finish before starting a new project. I told her I would see how well the book did, and I would go from there. The chat was open, pleasant, and very straight forward. There were no forcible book buying conspiracies going on.

I personally love both types of books – series, and stand alone. I write both; however, typically I get mail asking for continuation books. I try to appease as many of these requests as possible, while not locking myself in creatively. I like to write what I like to write. I have many plans for the future – series wise, and non, including my vampires. The Immortal Lover’s series will continue, starting with Eleni’s book, once I fullfill other writing obligations. I have already made mention of this elsewhere.

While I agree it is getting harder and harder to find single titles, I feel it is simply a natural process of storytelling. Readers and authors become attached to certain characters and want to read/write more about them. I do put higher priorities on some series stories rather than others, because it’s those stories that come more readily to me.

As for writers shutting out some series due to sagging sales, I’m sure it happens more often than we all realize. However those alleged “threats” do not always stand on terms of sales, and “sales” do not always equate to dollar values – it can (and does in my case) refer to number of books sold. When I sell only a handful of copies in a few months time, I’m highly unlikely to set the publishing world ablaze should I never get around to carrying out a particular series. However, when I get a reader email asking me if I plan to continue a series, or receive a nice review for a series book, I do tend to put that book higher up on my priority list – and there is certainly no shame in that. No “shilling” is involved. I’m sorry certain authors feel that way. Honestly, I think that whole affect has been grossly over-exaggerated.

I’m sure in some cases sales do actually drive this kind of writing hook, but in my own defense, as a novice e-author, financial aspects are hardly an issue – I don’t earn enough for money to dictate what I write.

Time, however, is an issue. I only attempt to make a sound judgment call: Do I continue writing a series that isn’t going anywhere, or I do I go on writing in a different series where I have some small measure of reader interest. There’s nothing saying I can’t go back and work on the other later. And that’s all it’s really about. Unless you’re an established author standing to make a considerable amount of money, or sell an impressive number of books by dangling this sort of thing in front of your reader’s eyes, it means very little. And I’m not saying a handful of readers do not count. Quite the contrary. I respect my readers enough to tell them the truth of what’s going on in my own little writing bubble, and at this point in my career there are still a lot of uncertainties – a lot of ups and downs.

As I’ve already said: grossly over-exaggerated. I’ve been in this industry less than a year. Using a newbie who’s just getting her fins wet as an example for the entire industry makes very little sense to me, particuarly when I’ve made it crystal clear in interviews and on my personal blog that I’m still feeling my way around as an author, and that I’m still not sure what direction I plan to go in with my writing. If my readers don’t have a problem with that, I don’t see why my personal experimentation should cause such an upset among other authors in the writing community. Finding my name mentioned here has been quite bewildering.

On the otherhand, I sincerely apologize to anyone offended by the blog post regarding email received about Wicked Temption. I simply made an attempt to answer a question as honestly and timely as possible, without giving readers a false impression of my intentions for the future, and without painting myself into a box.

It’s easy for authors to say – oh Luna is an imprint not a line and that make’s all the difference. Readers don’t know the difference.

Well, yes and no. I’m both a reader and writer (20+ years’s worth of book review columns in the SF/F genre). I can mostly tell the difference between imprints and lines, but not always; I had initially pegged the Tor paranormals as “category romance”, but discovered (after publishing a review of one of the first Tor paranormals) that many romance readers and writers consider that term to apply strictly to numbered-series lines (which the Tor paranormals are not).

OTOH, I think readers are generally pretty intelligent, and can tell that the books in numbered-series lines are, for the most part, qualitatively different from single-title romances (Mira, etc.]. The Luna imprint (and I agree that it’s an “imprint”, not a “line”) is an odd duck in that it’s a cross-genre imprint — so it isn’t necessarily surprising that different readers come to Luna titles with different expectations. That’s unavoidable, especially given readers from different genre-cultures — as the overall run of comments demonstrates. But I don’t think it’s a product of failed marketing by the Luna marketing team.

Now, Bombshell — that’s an example of disastrously bad market/positioning strategy all the way around. But I digress.

Harlequin has spent decades building its reputation as the publisher of romance. Even non Harlequin books are considered romance.

/blink/

Um, would that include the Gold Eagle (mens’ action/adventure) imprint, and the cozy mysteries they publish under the Worldwide Library imprint — which are exactly as recognizable as Luna titles as emanating from the same corporate empire?

What it comes down to is that “series” is a word that means different things in different genres/market categories.

In mystery, the majority of series consist of standalone books with continuing characters. For a very long time, mystery series protagonists were pretty static from book to book — Christie’s Miss Marple, Emma Lathen’s John Putnam Thatcher, Ellery Queen’s Ellery Queen. That evolved over time, particularly as more mysteries began featuring paired leads, and now it’s normal for mystery protagonists to grow a romance over several books — mostly independent of the free-standing mystery plots.

Fantasy series, for the most part, tend to be plot-driven — which is a major reason that fantasy series tend to collapse if they get too long, because you can only stretch the classic fantasy plots out so far. There are exceptions, notably Pratchett’s “Discworld” novels — most of those are freestanding, or groupable into several distinct but parallel sub-series.

Romance, by contrast, is a strongly character-driven genre, and there’s a strong convention in genre romance for resolving the primary character arcs within a single volume. Thus what one typically gets in genre romances are “continuity series” — each individual book has its own individual romance, and multi-book stories consist of three or five or six romances involving interlocking characters (siblings, co-workers, etc.) addressing an external plot conflict.

All of these are series books — but they are different kinds of series books, and that’s where satisfying reader expectations can become fuzzy.

Some series do go on way too long but, sometimes I do feel that I am left hanging and I want to know what happens next. If I am invested in the characters, what are the problems that they are facing. I am not content with the “and they lived happily ever after.”

I do think that voracious readers have it VERY tough because you’ve read it all. There’s a certain “jaded”-ness (is that a word?) that comes with reading so widely. In other words, you’re a tough crowd. :-)

Julie Leto- you called me on the carpet, and that is fair. I would like to refer you to the rest of that paragraph. I was pleasantly surprised and happy to be so. If I really judged HQN to only be on par with bad writing I would not be complaining that they canceled several books I was anticipating. So please, before you paint me with a broad stroke as well, read my entire commentary.

Please note, my judgment on HQN books did not come after reading just one book but hundreds. The words voracious reader are often used towards me. I have read across multiple lines in HQN over the years. Things that I liked years ago I cannot stand now. And yes, the secret baby, virgin, sheik, cowboy, billionaire, greek whatever is what most frequently comes to mind. I know many great authors who I read started out there. I have even read the reprints of their earliest works and even there within that structure you see the potential.

To me, many HQN authors are given a formula, and some people break out of it better than others. While I generally do not read the HQN series novels, I do look over them when I go to the bookstore. I am always looking for something to suck me in. Favorite authors break out and they start this pesky habit (returning to Jackie’s point) of publishing once a year. Like a drug of abuse, I am always looking for my next hit. I have read plenty of excellent stories and plenty of crappy ones. I am currently obsessed with a HQN author whose book I picked up earlier this year. I had read the three of the preceeding books several years ago and thought they had an interesting point but I didn’t feel there was enough follow through. But this book, by a completely different author, but in this sames series caught me and held me and even now I am waiting on her getting a deal with any publisher because I want to read a story she came up with if this is what she did within the formulaic limits.

So, no, I don’t judge a publisher with one broad stroke. I could say things about my recent disappointment with releases from Avon and other publishers as well. My standards are different and vary with mood, time and the color of my hair. Defend them to your heart’s content, but over the years I made my investment, which is why I still give them a chance. Now that you have come to my notice, I get to go find out why DearAuthor mentioned your Marisela series. Once again, always looking for an author.

A question I have for anyone who does read series, how much more likely are you to purchase or start a series form a new author if you know the books are all going to come out within anywhere from 3 months or all within that year? I know I had sworn off of series for a time because anticipation is torture, but the Temeraire series came out basically one book every two months or so, and I know the romance publishers are putting out authors with similar timing. Are you more willing to pick up a book if you know that there will be some level of completion? I understand some people feel there needs to be dinner and a movie before we promise anything else, but what if there is dinner, a movie, great sex, and a ring? Would you take the option? Purely meant in book terms to be interpreted as desired.

Love the metaphor, but I don’t think it matters much to me. I enjoy both connected and non-connected books, but as a reader, I rarely want to read a book in the same series by the same author within a few months of the previous book. Connected books that follow some of the same characters (even if they each have different protagonists) feel very similar to each other to me, and it often gets montonous for me to read them close together. With only a few exceptions, I prefer to wait a year or so before reading the next book in the series.

Or if you are an author who doesn’t want to write romance, wouldn’t you be better off under a well known sci fi publisher such as Tor and Ace?

FYI, Tor has its own paranormal romance imprint: Tor Romance, which publishes authors such as C.T. Adams and Cathy Clamp.[/quote]

I’ve read a few of them, and can say that not every one of them will be considered a romance by a reader who’s first and foremost a romance reader.

But romance fans have been conditioned to expect a book for every Tom, Dick and Harry who pops in to say “Hello,” so we get mid-list authors writing books for characters who may not have a story either just yet or at all(if it wasn’t already calculated as sequel-bait) because readers email them “are you going to write Xs story?” and because as someone said, it boosts sales: but how much when it seems that a number of authors are being told that the sales of their first book will determine if they recieve a further contract? How is a new author with a brand new set of connected books or a series (that isn’t published by “Avon Romance”) going to guarantee that readers will even find the first book? What if readers don’t discover you until Book Three and are disgruntled to find that there are two other books that may be OOP or out of stock? Doesn’t the concept of the series or connected books hurt the new author rather than help them(if they are one of the large number of new authors who don’t hit anywhere near the ballpark the publisher shrugged their shoulders and hoped for the best for?)

What about authors coming on the tail-end of a trend(like paranormal romances or erotic romances, or back when historical romances fizzled)? Isn’t that destining new/mid-list authors to fail? This disturbs me because it seems as though publishers(esp romance imprints) are willing to toss things out to see if it sticks instead of acquiring books, series and connected books because they believe in them–and then if it does stick, the author is land-locked into it.

Jane, exactly!

>HQN cannot expect within one line/imprint to change the brand that is cemented in our minds. It may take decades.

So true. And interestingly, when Harlequin launched MIRA way back when, they were careful to have nothing on the MIRA books that would indicate they were published by Harlequin, so readers wouldn’t drag along their Harlequin expectations. I think this worked well for MIRA and kind of wish they’d done the same with HQN. I mean, I know that HQN is “My big, fat Romance!” but readers tend to categorize it as Harlequin, complete with all the “series line” associations. I think bookstores and distrubutors do, as well. When, really, the aim of the HQN imprint is that it’s every bit as mainstream as MIRA, only it’s Romance Mainstream.

And does this sound like I’m dissing series?? I am so not. I’ve been reading and writing series and loving it for longer than you need to know. ;) It’s just, well, back to the whole branding issue. There are great bennies to effective branding–for an author and a publisher. And then, there are also drawbacks…

Jane, you have an excellent point about Harlequin spending so much time and money building themselves as a romance brand and then not understanding when they can’t seem to effectively publish books that are not romances under that banner. I always assumed that Luna did not have any references to Harlequin on the books themselves, but since readers are much more plugged in, they knew and brought with them their expectations to have romance in their fantasy with these books. The one Luna book I read I really enjoyed…but then, I’m by no means a hard core fantasy reader and I’m not one to care about the level of romance in a book unless it’s a straight category.

My response was only to the comment that said Harlequin=bad writing. That, to me, simply isn’t true. That’s like saying romance=bad writing. Ahem. ;-)

Or if you are an author who doesn’t want to write romance, wouldn’t you be better off under a well known sci fi publisher such as Tor and Ace?

FYI, Tor has its own paranormal romance imprint: Tor Romance, which publishes authors such as C.T. Adams and Cathy Clamp.

HQN cannot expect within one line/imprint to change the brand that is cemented in our minds. It may take decades. (I.e, this is not your father’s oldsmobile – has that really worked?). It’s hard for me as a reader to separate the idea that HQN is putting out books without romance. I think I foolishly thought, oh, these Luna books will feature a strong romance wrapped up in the fantasy package which is why I bought them. I would never have bought them if they were straight fantasy.

And let’s face it, some of these authors would not have gotten sold to straight fantasy publishers. Gail Dayton with her polyamorous focus is not resonating well with straight fantasy fans. Luna is looking to tap into the romance market. That’s where the money is. But to get that market, you have to write and sell what the market is expecting or do something that so totally changes the market expectations but still satisfies the reader that you are targeting.

Luna was created to tap a specific market segment but maybe not even Luna understands who it is trying to sell to. If it is straight fantasy readers, then market to straight fantasy readers and if it is really good, like an Anne Bishop book or a Naomi Novik, I will probably buy it. If it is a romance/fantasy hybrid designed to appeal to the romance reader who would like fantasy, then it has to have romance in it. Or if you are an author who doesn’t want to write romance, wouldn’t you be better off under a well known sci fi publisher such as Tor and Ace?

A question I have for anyone who does read series, how much more likely are you to purchase or start a series form a new author if you know the books are all going to come out within anywhere from 3 months or all within that year? I know I had sworn off of series for a time because anticipation is torture…

Whoa.

There’s a saying in business: you can get it fast, you can get it good, you can get it cheap. Pick two of the three.

There are plenty of authors who are able to write quality work in a short time frame, and God bless them. I got lucky with my debut novel and wrote it in less than three months. My next book took longer: about eight months. (I also have a full-time day job, as well as a family with two young children, so my writing time is limited.) I did manage to write three books over the course of one year, but I don’t know if this will be the rule for me or the exception. So sure, it’s very possible to write multiple books for publication within a single year.

But keep in mind that once a book is written, it first has to be edited — which may include some heavy rewriting by the author — then copy edited, then proofread. Then printed and bound. Then distributed. (Let’s not even get into the marketing/promotion aspects.) This all takes time.

And the publisher is taking a huge risk by publishing multiple books in a series within a short amount of time. What if, for example, the first book does only moderately well…and the second book (which, let’s say, comes out two months later), does even worse? Where does that leave the third book, which comes out two months later?

I don’t think that publishing multiple books super fast is the answer. As a writer, I think this is asking too much. As a reader, if I don’t like the first book in a series, I am not going to bother with the rest of the books.

well, it was Harlequin and that never equated with high-quality writing.

Well, that sure as hell insulted me. Funny how Harlequin doesn’t equate with high quality writing (in your opinion) but the publisher has still launched the careers of such authors as Nora Roberts, Jennifer Crusie, Linda Howard, Tess Geritsen and countless others who have become industry leaders and trailblazers for romance novelists everywhere.

I’m not saying that every Harlequin is everyone’s cup of tea, but I despise when the entire publisher is painted with one broad stroke based on one book that someone might have read when they were twelve or the perception that all the books are crap because they might have a cowboy, bride or baby on the cover. MOST Harlequin authors do amazing things with those hooks (not to mention the fact that they sell like hotcakes)…writing some of the best books I’ve ever read in a shorter amount of pages than most. Talk about emotional punch.

The line I write for (Blaze) doesn’t have those hooks, but I can say with all honesty that many of the Blaze books have been judged a certain way simply because they have Harlequin on the cover. I’ve read some amazing books in that line–and in all the lines.

Hey, anyone can have whatever opinion they want, but I have the right to speak out and say don’t judge a book by its publisher unless you’ve read every book that publisher ever published. No publisher publishes one kind of book at one kind of quality level…particularly since the quality of writing is often a very subjective thing. I’ve read some books that have won major awards and they were, in my opinion, crap. I’ve read others that were brilliant. But hey, different strokes.

The bottom line is this–anyone who judges a book simply by their publisher really doesn’t understand how publishing works. Luna books were an imprint of Harlequin–not a line. There was no editorial directive the way there is with Blaze or Presents or Desire. The books have a theme, a focus…but other than that, the authors are (from what I understand) writing what they want just like any single title line.

That said, many long time Harlequin/Silhouette authors thought it was a bad idea to put Harlequin anywhere in the books because we’re well aware that prejudices against the publisher exist. But I believe the books should be judged on their own merit and not prejudged by who chose to publish their book.

I hate that too, Tara Marie. I think she’s the one who thought that trend would be cool and it isn’t especially if the pay-off isn’t all that great. I’m one of those readers who didn’t care for her multiple storylines either. Also, the series that she is writing NOW is a spin-off of sorts from her previous series. I am sick to death of SEALs.