The how-to of standalone series'

Hi guys, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m glad you stopped by. Last week, we finished up our series on all things love, and honestly, part of me didn’t want to let it go. I loved that series (get it?). But, every month always marks the start of a new series, and I have a really fun one for this month.

Creating a Series of Standalones

As you all know, or should know if you’ve been following me for any length of time, my current novel series is written this way. It’s a fantasy series, but each book is so individual that you don’t need to read them in any given order—at least, until the last book comes around, but we haven’t gotten there yet.

It’s not an easy thing to do when it comes to novel writing, so I thought I’d give it some attention this month. March also just so happens to be the month in which Anialych: People of Sand will be released, so it seemed fitting.

All month long, I’ll be giving you my tips and tricks to writing a series of this nature, a series of standalone novels that will still draw your readers into the pages and have them begging for more.

Today, I have a few questions I want you to answer, or at least ponder, before we get into the meat of the matter:

• Why not write a normal book series?
• What is it that draws you to writing standalones?

These are questions you’ll need to answer before you start working on your series. You need to at least have some idea of what you want to get from writing this series. After all, the whole point of writing is to create something transformational—if you don’t transform while writing it, then your readers can’t transform while reading it. So, tell me, why wouldn’t you write a normal book series?

For me, it was a question of timing. I’d been working on a “normal” series, a chronological series, in which every book relied on the one before it—and it was giving me a headache. I needed a breath of fresh air, a change that would allow me to clear my head and really think through my individual stories while still being able to mention things from the big picture. That’s why I didn’t even try to connect Cedwig with Coetir, while I was writing. All I wanted was for the stories to take place in the same world, without being so dependent on each other that I’d need to do a more rapid style of releasing them.

That’s also what draws me to reading standalones, incidentally. I don’t always want to read books that are entirely dependent on one another. Sometimes I want there to be finished stories, every time, but with a bigger picture that I can just start to see forming on the horizon.

But those are just my answers, from when I started the Druid Novels. Those were the things that pointed me in the right direction. And before you start writing your standalone series, those are things you should think about, too.

Thursday, we’ll start on our journey into the fun part.

[love]

{Rani Divine}