Wednesday's Writer's Tip - A Bit More On Series - #MFRWauthor

You have your series planned and the first story written. Now comes the time to market these stories that may take several years to write. What are some things you need to consider? There are a number of places they can be published. You can hope one of the big publishers picks the series up, you can go to a small publisher or you can publish the series yourself. But making the series appealing to readers is something that's very important. Writing the Fiction Series by Karen Wiesner has some hints about this and I'll show you what some of them mean.

When you're writing a series something in the titles of each story contained in the world you've created makes sense. There are many series out there. The series can have an over all title. I've used this several times in my own series. Affinities is one and then each of the titles of the particular stories falls under this major titles. An even better way is for each of the stories to have a particular word in the title of each book. I'm working on a series and though it does have a title for the whole series, each of the so far three stories and the fourth I'm working on has Dreams in the title. So here two markers are there to bring the stories to the attention of readers.

A second method is to make use of a series blurb. This is great for promoting the entire series and is something both general and specific to a series. The best way I can explain what I found about using such a thing is to have a series blurb that is very general and yet somehow leads the reader into the series. Such as Four teens are forced to leave their home and parents to seek teachers to show them how to use their affinities for Earth, Fire, Water and Air. Following this comes the blurb for the story. A reader finding that first line will think aha this is another story in that series.

There are two more suggestions that I'll address next time.