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In this episode we cover: 

• How to approach a series
• Setting up a character arcs
• Series writing for “pantsers”
• Making every book land with a punch
• Wrapping up a series early

This week’s question is: what’s your favorite series? (either you’ve written or read)

Recommendation of the week is: King of Battle and Blood by Scarlett St. Clair

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Helen’s Original Episode: 95

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Rebel of the Week is: Lottie Saahko

If you’d like to be a Rebel of the week please do send in your story, it can be any kind of rebellion. You can email your rebel story to rebelauthorpodcast@gmail.com

One new patron this week, welcome and thank you to Christina Kilada. A big thank you to my existing patrons as well. If you’d like to support the show, and get early access to all the episodes as well as bonus content you can from as little as $2 a month by visiting: www.patreon.com/sachablack

The post 153 How to Write a Successful Series with Helen Scheuerer appeared first on Sacha Black.

In this episode we cover: 

• How to assess your time
• Mistakes to avoid when trying to structure writing systems
• How to streamline your business
• Tiered launches
• How to assess your series success

This week’s question is: What do you want to learn more about?

Recommendation of the week is: I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston

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Find out more about Elana:

Join her Facebook group

Read her books for writers: Writing and Releasing Rapidly and Writing Killer Cover Copy

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Link to Las Vegas Talk

Rebel of the Week is: Allison Carroll

If you’d like to be a Rebel of the week please do send in your story, it can be any kind of rebellion. You can email your rebel story to rebelauthorpodcast@gmail.com

No new patrons this week, but a big thank you to my existing patrons. If you’d like to support the show, and get early access to all the episodes as well as bonus content you can from as little as $2 a month by visiting: www.patreon.com/sachablack

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Take Veronica Roth and the Divergent series. She finished her books and then did a whole spin off series based on the character Four. She wrote shorts, novels and all kinds of other crazy empire expanding nonsense and of course the fans all loved it.

I hadn’t even considered writing more than my planned number of books for my Fallon series as an option. But then I read James Howell’s latest book, Guinea Pigsand realised I’m half way there anyway and I haven’t even published the first book.

So here’s some tricks on maximising your book series empire inspired by Howell’s latest book.

If you haven’t heard me talk about Howell before, I’m surprised. I’ve interviewed him here and his first book A Disturbed Girl’s Guide to Curing Boredom is on my all time fave list.

But his latest book isn’t related to his Disturbed girl trilogy. It’s different. It’s a set of three longish short stories. Set in the same world (ours) albeit with a lot of fucked up individuals! Each short story has a different protagonist and all the stories culminate in a final joined up ending.

Veronica Roth (author of Divergent) took her protagonists love interest, Four, and wrote another set of stories too.

But what she did was dangerous. We were used to one character, frankly I liked the protagonist I wouldn’t have spent weeks worth of baths and bottles of wine indulging myself in the story if I hadn’t. AND lets face it – not many people like change – taking another character into a spin off series is riskier than knife throwing under the influence.

But Howell didn’t do that, he took completely different characters and embroiled them in a completely different story – I thought it had no connection, no relation to the original series and I’ll be honest, that concerned me. I worry when reading an authors ‘other work’ because nine times out of ten, if I love one book series, I’ll hate the next. It happened with Charlaine Harris’ True Blood, and I’ve no doubt it will happen again.

But it didn’t with Howell.

I’ve heard of other indie authors doing this, writing longer shorts and combining them all in the final story, but I wasn’t sure it would work, let alone work off the back of a trilogy.

But it did.

The reason it worked, was the way he connected the stories to his original work. There is a reveal, it’s tiny, barely a sentence but it clearly links back to his original series and opens the door WIDE to a whole other storyline (in new books) with our fave protagonist – just when we thought it was all over too.

And who knows, maybe it was really all over. Maybe ‘just carry on your story’ sounds too obvious. Except that it really was over for JK Rowling until apparently it wasn’t and now we have a whole new book/play thing coming out. Likewise, Roth executed her main character, how much more over can you get? Except that it wasn’t either because now there’s the four series. This is an emerging trend and I don’t think it’s going away.

This trend is like the ultimate cure for a book hangover – and selfishly, means that even when you write ‘the end’ on a trilogy/series you (the author) get to continue to write about that world you love so much too.

I’ve had to write shorts to work out plot problems, and back story in my own novel. In fact, I have entire chapter length stories that were written about side characters, all of which I was happy to leave in some obscure e-folder never to be opened again. But given this trend, maybe I’m missing a trick. Who’s to say these won’t be useful for something else once the series is over.

8 Different ways to maximise your series

1. Use world building short stories – explore different worlds, or cities and locations within your own world. What happens in them when the reader isn’t looking.
2. Use minor, secondary characters or love interests to write spin offs whether thats a short or an entire series in its own right.
3. Move your world on, what happened 100 years after your trilogy ended? World buildings hard work – why waste an entire world on just one series.
4. Use brand new characters but in the same world
5. History (write the prequel to your novel)
6. Like twilight, write the SAME story from the love interests POV (E.L. James copied Meyer once by publishing 50 shades as fan fiction but, is it just me, or was she taking the piss by publishing the grey series when Meyer tried to do it first and had her MS leaked?! talk about copycat)
7. Write a radio play or a Westend using your characters or your world
8. Write short stories about the main characters past or their future

and here’s a bonus one, inspired by this post from Linda, write your protagonists autobiography.

I contacted James, to see what his thoughts were and asked a couple of questions on how he has maximised his series:

James, what made you put the reference to hannah in when you had finished your trilogy?

Although the Disturbed Girl trilogy finished quite neatly with Hannah (or what was left of her) sailing off into the sunset, I always thought there was scope to explore what she did next. Where does she go after Cyprus? How does she recover from her injuries? Does her relationship with Luisa survive? Can she really be a mother to Naomi?

I suppose I semi-retired her at the end of A Disturbed Girl’s Redemption, meaning that I could move on to other characters – as I’ve done with Guinea Pigs – but still bring her back if my readers wanted more and I felt there was a worthy story to tell.

Readers have told me they want more Hannah, and to be honest I’ve rather missed her, so my plan is to bring her back in some way for my next novel.

Because “Boredom” was written as a one-off, I found it tricky coming up with a realistic plot line for the sequel. Some people have said that the plot of A Disturbed Girl Implodesis too much of a stretch, and that’s probably a fair criticism. I’d certainly urge authors to consider sequel options while they’re writing their debut novel (killing off your hero isn’t a good idea, for example!)

How else can you maximise your series? Let me know in the comments.

If you haven’t signed up for my newsletter already, there’s still time before the next one is due out. It’s full of tips, tricks and hacks for writers. Sign up HERE.

Find out more on about James and his genuinely amazing Disturbed Girl series on his website follow him on Facebook or buy the book using the amazon blurb link.

Amazon Blurb

This dark collection of short stories examines three seemingly unconnected people as they slide along separate paths towards chaos and tragedy. Will any of them find salvation, or will they all be destroyed by the terrible deception that unites them?

Guinea Pig 1 – The Man Who Couldn’t Laugh
Colin Jones is a neurotic suburban nobody who has a serious problem with his new neighbours. Spurred on by what he reads in the tabloid press, how far will he go to get them evicted?

Guinea Pig 2 – A Wild Life
A damaged woman travels to Africa to escape from her life of sex and violence. As she touches down in the Gambia, she has no idea that her nightmare is just beginning.

Guinea Pig 3 – Red Demon
Detective Josh Brody works in the bleak underbelly of south London trying to protect victims of hate crime. It is a grim world, and he might be closer to the misery than he realises

The post 8 Ways to Maximise Your Book Series appeared first on Sacha Black.

Well, reading, watching TV and my interests are the same way. I wish more than anything reading wasn’t included in that and that I read a little, consistently, everyday but I don’t have time and thats why my TBR pile is over 200 high. So what do I do?

I binge.

I sit for hours and zone out, ogling whatever the latest TV series is and indulge in episode after episode until I am so saturated with the programme or book series that I actually have to readjust when I put it down! When I’ve talked about this kind of behaviour before, there’s seemed to be a bit of stigmatism around the act of binge indulgence. I get it. It’s not productive in terms of life admin and chores, and it does brew a bit of laziness, but you know what? When I thought about it I realised that actually, it’s a kind of helpful thing to do as a writer.

1. Bingespiration

There’s never been an occasion when I have fallen into a binging spree that I haven’t been inspired. When I binge, it’s usually because I have fallen in love with a series, or a book or a character. For example, I binge read a guilty pleasure – Charlaine Harris’s True Blood novels, I read the first one (Dead Until Dark: A True Blood Novel (Book 1)) in like, a day! And then I powered through the following 12 books over the next 8 weeks. I read four on our week long holiday! My wife didn’t see me for two months whilst I selfishly indulged in the books and fell into their world. I have just done the same with Once Upon A Time a TV show, I am now impatiently waiting week on week for Netflix to release the next episode.

What’s my point? My point is, going on a binge beats writers block. It allows you to forget your woes, your own obsessions with your book babies and allows you to slip into other fantasy worlds. It’s escapism. It’s what we write for, we want to do this to other people, so why not experience it for ourselves. And what better way to inspire you back into writing than to enjoy getting lost in your fave show/book/series.

2. Bingination

There’s nothing like a bingefest to get your imagination going. I have this thing… when I finish a series I have binged on, I feel, bereft. Literally. As I close the final page, I sort of wake up, open my eyes and all of a sudden I am back to reality. With the god awful realisation that I don’t in fact live in Bon Temps, Louisiana, nor am I a vampire, and I am neither Sookie Steakhouse nor her friend in real life. It hurts. Like bad. Because for a minute there, we were braiding each others hair, and biro-tatting BFF on each others arms.

Seriously. Is it just me? Or does anyone else get so sucked in on a binge that real life disappears? My point is, we can learn from this. From the fireworks it gives our imagination and the depths we can be sucked into. We writers need to deconstruct and analyse what happens to us as we fall into a binge, and then replicate, replicate, replicate.

If I think about the True Blood series, it was the world she created. I hadn’t read a vampire story in which the world at large new they existed. I thought it was unique, and it instantly drew me in. I also loved the love story that ran through it. Right up till she ruined it at the end of the last book!

3. Bingentration

Are my binge words just getting weird now? Well binges force one to concentrate, hard, and for long periods of time.

So no excuse for not concentrating next time you need to get a post out, or smashing 1667 words every day of NaNo November. If you can binge watch/read you can binge write.

4. Bingearching

This for me is the out right winner. If you can binge watch and concentrate then surely you can binge on research too? I talked about the importance of getting out and doing actual research recently in my post 5 Reasons Writers Should Be Secret Agents.

But now I’m transferring the skills I have for binge indulgences, into research. By submersing myself into book topics, times, locations and clothing etc so that I know everything there is to know on the topic. It ensures my books credibility whilst doing it quickly (given it’s a binge) resulting in an all round winner for effectiveness and efficiency.

And there’s nothing I like more than something that’s both effective AND efficient!

What do you think? Do you ever binge on anything? Do you find it useful or a distraction?

The post Confessions from a Serial Binger – 4 Reasons Writers Need to Binge appeared first on Sacha Black.