You might not think it at first, but as a writer, there’s a lot you have in common with a drug dealer. You both have to hustle to make money, the cash you do bring in comes from selling a fantasy to clients, and the best of you know how to keep that client hooked and neglecting more important things in their lives.

Hold on, John, you might be saying, I got a college degree that I paid for with my own parents’ money. Don’t lump me in with those criminal street urchins. Well, first of all, drugs are what make our federal government and financial institutions run on, so get off your high horse. But for the purposes of this video, there’s a lot us writers can learn from drug dealers.

You see, each book we write can be thought of as a dose or a high or a trip. If we do it right, we’ll have them clamoring for more. But we’ve got to be reliable. We have to make sure our product is always available on the corner of Douglas and 3^rd,, in a manner of speaking. For writers who don’t write series, or even worse hop genres, well, that’d be like your neighborhood crack dealer switching to peyote with no warning.  

An ongoing series is a great way to build a following, even if you’re a small-time author. If there’s one change I’ve noticed in the industry in my 26 years inside it, besides the fact that pretty much everything is sexual harassment nowadays, it’s that the biggest authors are the ones who write series. Take Sarah J. Maas, for example. Now, I’ve never actually read Sarah J. Maas, but any writer who can get their books sold next to the Doritos aisle at Target is doing something right.

But writing a successful series is a tough thing to do. You have to go beyond writing individually compelling works of fiction. We’ll make hugely elaborate plans and hopefully not get bored before we finish them on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Before you start writing a series, there are a series of questions you need to ask yourself. Let’s take a look at them.

Question 1: Do I want to devote years to this project? Do I have any friends or family that might get upset that I won’t answer their teacher’s emails or pick them up from the bus station at midnight?

A book series is definitely something best tackled by a writer whose family is either all dead or who, by this point, doesn’t expect them to ever change.

Question 2: Does the concept behind the series have enough stamina to last for several books?

For example, I was planning on writing a five-book historical fiction series about the assassination of President Garfield, but by book three, I realized my reader was probably getting sick of hearing about 19^th century civil service reform.

Question 3: Can you keep track of all the details and weave them throughout your series?

You might want a minor character to appear in the first book and not return until the fifth book, when they’re all grown up and handsome and ready to raw dog the heroine.

But it can be an organizational nightmare.

That’s why when I started the ten-book series, The Blackstone Chronicles, in 2018, I hired a man servant to live with me and keep track of all my ideas. I even got a cot for him to sleep in the corner of my bedroom so he could write down ideas that came to me in my dreams. If he hadn’t stolen my social security number to pay for his wife’s knee surgery, I likely would’ve finished the series.

So let’s say you’ve got no family obligations, a killer concept and a loyal man servant who came cheap on Craigslist. Let’s look at some tips to make sure this series stays strong.

Tip 1: You Need One Overarching Plot and Each Book Needs Its Own Resolution

Cliffhangers are great and everything, but no reader’s going to wait until Book 10 for you to blow your load. In Star Wars, for example, most of the movies end up with them blowing up a death star, but it doesn’t really matter because the overarching plot is to stop this old white guy who, in fairness to him, can do a 1080 barrel roll from a seated position.

I find it helpful to think of the overarching goal first, and then break it into smaller subgoals. When I wrote the They/Them Murders series, the main goal was to uncover the leftist billionaires’ plot to arm trans people to commit murders and other acts of terrorism. But each book was mostly focused on solving an individual murder case. Of course, it turned out the information I was using for research was fabricated by a right-wing conspiracy theory podcast and my first book had endangered the trans community of Missouri so I cancelled the series.

Tip 2: Consider the Format

Like an open box of crackers or a relationship that lasts more than a month, a book series runs the risk of becoming stale. For example, I didn’t need nine books of The Expanse telling to keep reminding me that billionaires are awful. If I needed that reminder, I’d just poke my head outside the window.

So spice things up by switching to a totally different format. Get wild with it. When I wrote the young adult five-book fantasy series, From Mud to Clay, I paused from the quest to find the stones and defeat the evil witch and made Book Four a medieval cookbook. Granted, this was also because I was hoping that writing educational material for children would give me some much-needed tax breaks, but it still shook things up nicely, I think. If I’d actually gotten those tax breaks, I likely would’ve bothered writing Book Five.

Tip 3: Be Consistent

You can’t forget that people are mostly reading these books because they like you and your writing style. Sometimes when looking at yourself in a mirror, it’s a tough thing to remember that people like you.

You can switch formats and genres and add some gratuitous sex scenes, but you shouldn’t try to be something you’re not. If you’re funny, don’t lose your sense of humor. If you’re good at exploring the dark side of humanity, kill a few dogs if your main characters need to survive to the final book.