Discussing Serial Business vs. Serial Craft
A few months back, I went to see Garth Nix and John Birmingham in conversation at the local library, and Birmingham busted out a little bon mot that’s stuck with me: If we write something, and we do our jobs right, it’s going to get published. It’ll go to our publishers, and if they don’t want it, we can publish it ourselves and take home that sweet 70% self-pub royalty. This doesn’t imply that it’s going to be massively successful or make scads of money, of course, but it puts writers in a really interesting position. For the first time, publication is guaranteed if you start a project, and that frees you up to take chances you wouldn’t necessarily take in publishing environment focused on brick-and-mortar bookstores. I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week, because it feeds into the research I’ve been doing on writing series for my thesis. Series fiction has traditionally been one of those things that goes in and out of vogue in publishing, often connected to the kinds of stories that make strategic sense in a particular era. In the days of pulp magazines, where series characters became a drawcard, you saw the rise of authors creating iconic series characters. In the age when novels dominated, and the short shelf-life of a book limited access to backlist, you saw a run where books in series–or even trilogies–would only acknowledge their interconnection through trade dress. The words “book one of Series X” would rarely appear
