Prequels vs short stories

I had some nice comments about my podcast this week (thanks everyone!) and one of the commentors seemed puzzled at my dislike of prequels, pointing out that I had in fact written several prequels.

That is true – I have written a couple of prequel books. BLADE OF THE GHOSTS is a short prequel novel for Caina that I give away to my newsletter subscribers, and FROSTBORN: THE FIRST QUEST is a prequel for the entire FROSTBORN series. For that matter, FROSTBORN: THE SKULL QUEST is also a FROSTBORN prequel, and anyone who signs up for my newsletter gets that for free as well. That said, I wrote all those some years ago, and I doubt I would write another prequel book.

Why not?

Prequels always seem like a distraction from the main plot. Like, imagine you need to paint your front porch. So you go into the garage to get paint and brushes. But while you’re in there, you decide to reorganize the garage. Eventually, you get the garage organized, but the front porch remains unpainted.

Writing prequels when the main series remains unfinished feels a bit like that. At its worst, it can turn into an exercise in navel-gazing instead of advancing the main plot.

That said, I do write short stories fairly frequently that could count as prequels. THE FIRST SORCERESS is sort of a prequel that contains the origin story of Azalmora, the main villain of the DRAGONSKULL series. THE PROPHECY OF THE HIGH QUEEN is essentially a prequel for the entire CLOAK GAMES/MAGE series.

So why am I contradicting myself? What gives?!? 🙂

I view the short stories as sort of “bonus scenes on a DVD.” Like, sometimes you see bonus scenes on a DVD and you think, yeah, they made the right call to delete that. But a good bonus scene can give insight into the plot and characters you might not have had otherwise.

I once joked that the plot of all my short stories were basically “Caina Goes On A Side Quest, Sometimes With Friends”, which I think is fair. The short stories are intended as a nice bonus, one that you can read if you want, but you don’t have to in order to follow the main plot of the books.

And I do have a very practical reason for giving away short stories – newsletter engagement! Email marketing is hard because a lot of newsletters get marked as spam. But the more people who click on links in my newsletter, the higher its engagement score, and the less likely it will be marked as spam. Giving away free short stories is a great way to get link clicks.

So, I don’t like writing prequels, but I view short stories as free bonus material for newsletter subscribers that has the nice bonus of keeping my newsletter out of fewer spam folders.

-JM