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 until the series had proved it could be a perennial seller and justify the warehousing costs.

In the age of Amazon–and in particular the age of the ebook and social media that allows you to refer people back to book 1 again and again and again–serial fiction is a hugely solid investment. The business case for it has been explored in countless self-publishing forums and courses, and if you’re interested a quick search of indie publishing and readthrough will find you a host of resources.

It feels like traditional publishing has been slow to capitalise on it, outside of a few rare outliers like Tor.com who seem to have been custom-built as the test case for blending traditional and indie approaches.

But the thing that intrigues me, and the thing that sent me scurrying off to do a PhD, is the relative dearth of people willing to discuss the craft side of series. I recently sat through a webinar where a prominent voice in self-publishing talked about writing a fifteen-book series, noting there is no limit to how long you can keep going.

This is both technically correct, given the circumstances above, but fails to take into account the way a long-running series will clash with all sorts of commonly held assumptions about the way narrative is structured. Authors are often encouraged to focus on characters at the point of their greatest change, and this quickly becomes absurd if you apply that logic to fifteen books in a row.

There’s only a handful of resources I’ve come across that truly try to engage with the series as its own thing, and the implications of that. Most folks treat them like one big story (a really bad approach that doesn’t fit some serial conventions) or a bunch of individual stories that just happen to connect.

I’ve got a longer list of resources I’ve put together for a recent webinar outlining my research, but if you’re looking for one my strongest recommendation remains Robin Laws Beating the Story.

Laws is one of RPG game design’s most innovative narrative thinkers, which means he’s spent a lot of time pondering how to replicate stories moods and themes in games in addition to his fiction writing. Couple this with a strong love of pulp genres, and you get an innovative breakdown of narrative craft that steps away from familiar models and incorporates approaches that don’t rely on a big narrative arc.

It’s very much the start of a discussion that needs to be had around series fiction, especially since it’s likely to explode over the next decade. While the idea of recurring characters has always had some appeal, writers have traditionally struggled to get a long-running series off the ground due to the realities of publishing.

Now that it’s possible to do an ongoing series in a cost-effective way, lets start thinking about how to write them better and play to the strengths series fiction has over the stand-alone novel.