Starting Over-- series

by Rain Trueax

Many times, I've mentioned how it's not about simply putting a book out but about launching it-- if someone cares about selling that book. The first part is easy-- follow the dots. The second not so much. It has to be in the right genre, have helpful tags, places to let readers see it, ads, but there is another thing that makes a difference-- having it part of a series.

What a series does is when a reader likes a set of characters, a place, a theme, they often will follow it up. I got one criticism early on that i hadn't made it clear that the book they bought was second in the series. Readers like to read books, especially with connecting characters, in order. When you do an ad, a series makes a reader more likely to also buy the next and the next. I've seen it play out time and again. You pay to advertise one book but reap the benefit for the rest. 

Series can based on a place, characters, or theme. You have seen how that worked with wildly successful books, like the Harry Potter books, Game of Thrones, etc., but it's a plus even for those that are not.

When I wrote the novella, Diana's Journey, I saw it as the beginning of such a series, of a common theme. The story is about a woman trying to find a new way after an unwanted divorce and with an empty nest. Diana's story had romance, but it really was about how we can rebuild a broken life and our American West.

Seemingly promising, but because I was involved with the paranormal/fantasy/supernatural/whatevertheheckthatis series, I didn't actually write another novella with that theme (I still plan to do that). .

Most recently, this series idea has been in the back in my head when I began looking at my contemporaries.  While I could fit the ones with danger and the ones with a paranormal aspect into their own series, I had some books that were orphans. No danger like Romances with an Edge and nothing supernatural like Mystic shadows. What the three books had in common was their setting in the American West and modern times. In each case, they were about life changing in unexpected ways-- you know, starting over...

The first of these, Luck of the Draw, had been written years ago, back when I began writing novels (ones I didn't try to publish). I had been living in its time period, 1974, and researched the life I didn't know-- the world of rodeo.  

I had brought out my contemporaries when I began to think about this older story. It required finding the box its pages were in and typing the whole thing into my computer. Somehow in moving it around, I had lost the last four pages. Fortunately, I remembered how it ended and added on a epilogue for the eBook.
 
Even after all those years, I was still drawn to the story of this young couple, each looking to move ahead with their lives. This was the tail-end of the Vietnam War, a powerful time of transition in the US and especially in rodeo where the world of the wild and woolly cowboy was moving toward one of professional athletes. 

Billy is part of that new breed, but there are secondary characters still clinging to what was. When he and Sara meet, she's at her own crossroads--  She loves painting but her parents don't see that as realistic. These two come together in one week, and everything changes for them.

As I typed it in, I debated updating to modern times as much had changed for things like cell phones, computers, etc. Sometimes updating is the best choice but not for this story. It needed that time period for life and the rodeo. To update it to today would have required researching again the rodeo. so much changed after Lane Frost's death. It needed to stay where it was.

There is debate still today as to what such a book is called. It's not really contemporary. Some say it's Vintage. Others argue for Contemporary Historic. I have no idea but it is where it belongs in 1974 and it is about starting over.

The other book that didn't fit in Romances with an Edge was From Here to There. It begins in Boston but moves to Montana with a wedding that the bride knows is a mistake. She goes through with it but tells the groom she wants an annulment on their way to the reception. 

The groom is logically angry. She heads for her uncle's ranch in Montana where her uncle has encouraged the groom to follow and show her there is more to him than she thinks.

This is one of those books that I wrote because of my love of the ranching lifestyle and the West-- from the Old West to today. There is no villain in it, and the danger is through the work and the unpredictability of nature. 

A novella followed it, A Montana Christmas, where it's about a family and can they find a new start given all that has come before. It is the family in From Here to There that come together for the holiday and about the changes that lie ahead. 

So, this week, I revamped the four covers and put them onto a banner. This series is following a similar theme but not connecting characters other than From Here to There  and A Montana Christmas. Will their being linked this way make them more appealing to readers? Who knows, but it made me feel good :), and isn't that a lot of what it's about! 

For those of you working on a book, keep in mind the marketing benefit of series writing. It's no guarantee of success, but it is actually rewarding to think in terms of connecting ideas and people. Often as a writer, when I finish I book, I miss the characters. This has the emotional added benefit as a way to keep in touch with them as secondary to the next book.