A single road gets you to one place. A network gets you to the place you didn’t know you needed until you arrived at the first one. My books sit in eleven series. That wasn’t a marketing plan and it wasn’t deliberate at the start. It emerged because every book I finished produced a second question I couldn’t answer inside it.
I love writing in series, and calling it a marketing gimmick misses what a series does for a story. When a series is done right, every book exists because a reader needed it, and that’s a better reason to write a book than most of the ones I hear.
Should you write a book series or a single book?
A series answers the question the reader has at the end.
A book on preparing a household for an emergency ends with somebody thinking about what to keep in a car. A book on that ends with somebody thinking about the wider question of what they’re preparing for. Neither of those belongs inside the other, and both are real.
A standalone has to either cram them in, which produces a bloated book with no shape, or stop and leave the reader somewhere. A series stops cleanly and points.
The reader benefit is specific. Somebody who finished your book and wants more has told you something valuable about themselves, and a standalone has no way to respond. I think leaving that reader with nowhere to go wastes the best moment an author ever gets.
The book on this: The Gig Economy is one of six books in The Working Life, each written for somebody in a different situation instead of on a different topic.
Does a series help commercially?
Yes, and the mechanism is duller than people expect.
The hardest thing in publishing is getting somebody to read the first one, and that cost has already been paid. A reader who finished one of your books is a completely different prospect from a stranger, and the second book faces almost none of the friction the first did.
That’s also why a series works when a bestseller doesn’t. Eight books each selling steadily to an audience that already trusts you is a more durable business than one book that did well and had no successor. I think the industry’s fixation on the breakout title hurts authors who could have built something steadier, because it teaches them to bet everything on one book.
The book on this: My Job Sucks is another of the six, for the person who has decided and doesn’t know the sequence for leaving.
How do you decide the boundary between books?
By the reader, not by the subject.
The instinct is to split by topic. That produces books that overlap awkwardly and readers who can’t tell which one they need. The better split is by who the reader is at that moment and what they’re trying to decide.
The Working Life has six books. I built each one around a different situation somebody could be in: hating the job, having a bad manager, being suddenly unemployed, wanting to manage well, deciding whether to leave, working out the ethics of staying. A person knows immediately which one they’re in.
Split by topic and you get chapters pretending to be books. Split by situation and every book has an obvious reader.
What is the risk of writing books in a series?
Repetition, and it’s the failure mode nobody plans for. Books in a series share a foundation, so the same background material wants to appear in each one. Do it fully and readers of the second book feel they’ve paid for a chapter they already own. Leave it out and a first-time reader is lost.
Split by topic and you get chapters pretending to be books.
The compromise I use is a short version with a pointer. A paragraph that gets somebody oriented, then an explicit note about which book covers it properly. Nobody feels cheated and nobody is stranded.
The other risk is a series that exists to justify a fourth book nobody needed. I can’t stand padded series. Three books with a clear boundary beat six with two of them filler, readers work that out faster than authors do, and the reader who paid for the filler rarely trusts that author again.
The book on this: Suddenly Unemployed is the one for the week after, and none of the three would fit inside either of the others.
When is a series the wrong choice?
When the subject resolves.
Some books answer a question completely. A memoir of one period is done when the period is done. A book making one argument has said it. Extending either into a series produces sequels that repeat the original with less to say.
The test is whether the second book has a reader who’s in a different situation, or only a reader who liked the first one. The second reason is how bad sequels get commissioned.
| Aspect | Standalone | Series |
|---|---|---|
| What it answers | One question, then stops | The question the reader has next |
| Leftover questions | Crams them in, or leaves the reader somewhere | Stops cleanly and points |
| Reader who wants more | No way to respond | The next book is already there |
| Commercial shape | One book that did well with no successor | Several books selling steadily to readers who trust you |
| Main risk | A bloated book with no shape | Repetition and padded filler books |
| Right choice when | The subject resolves | The next book has a reader in a different situation |
My take
Series beat standalones for one reason. Readers come back when the next book answers their next question. Split the books by the reader’s situation and each one has an obvious buyer. The Working Life works that way, with a book for the bad manager, the lost job and the decision to leave. Split by topic and you get chapters pretending to be books. Plan the shared background before book one, or book two will repeat it.
How do you set up a book series from the beginning?
Write one book properly and see what it produces.
Planning a series before finishing the first book is a common way of never finishing the first book, and I’d tell any writer with a five-book plan and no finished manuscript to put the plan in a drawer. The questions that make book two obvious mostly don’t exist until book one is written, because they come from the reader, and no outline can supply them.
What’s worth doing at the start is leaving the door open. Don’t title it as definitive. Don’t promise total coverage in the introduction. Both of those make a second book look like an admission that the first was incomplete.
The rest of this series covers the practical decisions: publishing types, ISBNs, and the return on publishing a book. The Library shows how the eleven series are laid out, and my ghostwriting service handles the ones clients don’t have time to write.
I think the single-book mindset costs authors more than they realize. They write one good book, leave the reader standing at the end of it holding a question, and then wonder why nobody came back. Write the book properly, listen to what the reader asks next, and let that question decide whether a second book deserves to exist.
Make a Living as a Self-Published Author treats writing as a business built on books that work together. I wrote it for authors who want a catalog that keeps earning.
