Book Series

It is quite common nowadays particularly for fantasy writers to plan more than one book to tell their story. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this (I may have another post to talk about this later), problems can arise if you plan the whole series, write and publish the first book, and then finish the series one book at a time.

One problem is consistency. In the early life of your story, you are not going to think up entire situations, back stories, or whatnot until some time later. If you write and publish only one book at a time, while continuing the story, you may discover some secret history between two of the characters or some new side plot that would make the story... except the problem is that the previous book as been published and cannot be altered. So thus you are forced to introduce something new rather suddenly and which could require character personalities or histories to be changed, but which cannot be altered drastically without coming across as inconsistent. I have seen this myself as my own work in progress has changed over the three and one-half years of its existence where the story largely remains the same but where characters and back stories evolve into something originally different.

A related issue is a greater amount of world-building that will inevitably take place the further you go into a story. It depends on the author, but you may develop more of the history, the languages, or an endless list of side aspects to the story; if you use magic in the story, you may deepen it and expand the rules. However, if you write-publish one book at a time, you will run into further problems of consistency. An example would be Christopher Paolini's "Inheritance Cycle". Because the books were all written at different times (in other words, he planned out the series but wrote each book one at a time), his explanation for magic and related magical events are different for each book, and thus his magic does not make sense at all.

Another problem of writing one book at a time is you may lose steam. I myself have gone through the stage of fantasy writing where I write one book and plan for others but by the time I finish at least the first part of the story, I have to put an end to the series for whatever reason there is, whether it be because of a bizarre plot or because I got bored with it. If you have already published one book, your readers will be expecting more of the story and so you will have to force yourself to finish it, which will result in bad writing. Or, in the cases of authors like George R. R. Martin, you take forever to finish it for whatever reason and so incur the wrath of your impatient readers, which may also cause you to lose your audience.

In the end, if you want to write a book series, it is best if you write it all out at once over a period of time and develop the story. This will help you develop the story itself but will also tell you if you really want to stick with it for a while. Sure, it may take years for you to finish the story completely to the point where you are happy with it, but remember my earlier post: the longer you sit on your story and develop it, the better it will turn out.