Preorders & Prequels!

I have to admit “Preorders & Prequels” sounds like a really lame tabletop RPG about indie authors.

Like, if you roll a d20, your book gets picked up as Amazon Daily Deal for the US. But if you roll a 1, your book file gets corrupted and you can figure out how to fix it.

Anyway, the inspiration for this alliterative title was that someone asked me about preorders and someone else asked me about prequels within 24 hours.

So, reader Juan asks about preorders:

“Something I noticed about your books, there never is a “preorder” option on Apple Books. Is this by design? I know you self publish so I didn’t know if that was a publisher feature or if there is a way to preorder there. If not no worries, I just know Apple takes a little longer to load the book.”

It’s by design. I never do preorders for a couple of different reasons. They’re good reasons, I promise!

1.) The consequences of missing a preorder date are moderately negative. Like, if you miss a preorder on Amazon, you get locked out of doing another one for the following twelve months. I’m not sure what happens if you miss a preorder on Apple Books, but I suspect it’s about the same level of penalty.

2.) Life is chaotic and unpredictable, and I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep. Like, if I get sick, or something in Real Life comes up, I could easily miss a week of writing time, which would make hitting a preorder date either very stressful or impossible.

3.) If I wrote like two books a year, I might do preorders. That would give me enough cushion of time to make sure everything is ready to go well in advance of the launch date. But I usually write ten books a year. With stuff coming out so frequently, organizing that many preorders would be a headache, and sometimes I don’t actually decide what I’m going to write next until I actually start it. Like, at the end of 2023, I pretty much decided on impulse to finish writing HALF-ELVEN THIEF and have that be my last book of the year. So with the amount I write, managing the logistics of so many preorders would be a serious headache.

4.) The worst consequence of missing a preorder is a lost of reader confidence. Without going into details, let’s say there’s been enough of that in the fantasy genre.

So, preorders have too many negatives and not enough positives, at least for my situation. I’d rather just make a good faith effort of have things out when I can and announce them via my newsletter. Speaking of which, if you sign up for my newsletter, you get regular free short stories!

Concerning prequels, reader Danny writes to ask:

“May I suggest writing a series of prequels to the Cloak Games series? The Shield of Conquest made me hope that it would be a prequel book to the Cloak Games series, A book that speaks about the invasion of Earth by the elves and brings some backstory of the relationship between Kaethran Morvilind and Tarlia – a teacher and a student, and the discovery and invasion of Earth, or other backstories that were not developed enough, for example about Aidan, the brother of Riordan, or Riordan’s experience as a shadow hunter.”

Generally speaking, I’m not a big fan of prequels. I have written a couple of prequel novels out of the 155 that I’ve written – FROSTBORN: THE FIRST QUEST comes to mind – and sometimes I’ll do short stories as a flashback. Probably the most recent example is PROPHECY OF THE HIGH QUEEN, the first meeting between Nadia and the High Queen written from the High Queen’s perspective. The High Queen uses magic to look into Nadia’s past and her various potential futures, and so the short story bounces all over the place in time. I have also written novels that kind of jump around in time – in CLOAK OF IRON, the scenes from Lauren Casey’s perspective go back even before the CLOAK GAMES series actually started, to set up why she was desperate enough to save her brother that she was willing to deal with someone like Mr. Shang of the Deathless Society. Or in the very first Nadia book, CLOAK GAMES: THIEF TRAP, where we blur through the first twenty years of Nadia’s life in the first chapter.

That said, I do write the short stories as “bonus” material, like extra scenes on the DVD. However, at this point, I don’t think I would write a prequel novel, and I certainly wouldn’t write a prequel series.

Why not? It feels like prequels are sort of like procrastinating before you continue on the main story, which is likely what most readers really want. I’ve noticed some writers (again, without going into details) have a bad habit of writing prequels instead of getting on with the main story. Making yourself continue on the main story instead of getting sidetracked by prequels or side quests is difficult, but it must be done for the greater good of the story.

Also, some things are better left to the reader’s imagination. Writing fiction is in some ways an exercise in creating a line drawing and letting the imagination of the reader provide the color and the shadow. Like, since we’ve been talking about Nadia, here’s someone describing her from first-person perspective:

“A woman in a dark coat and black jeans sat across from me. She had red-tinged brown hair tied in a loose ponytail and pale gray eyes the color of knives. I thought she looked like she could stand to eat more. That, combined with the eyes, gave her a look of feverish, almost unsettling, intensity. I probably outweighed her by a good ninety pounds, but I felt the sudden urge to reach for the gun I wasn’t carrying.” 

That’s just a line drawing, right? Every reader will fill in that line drawing with something from his or her own imagination.

In the same way, I think it is sometimes best to let the reader’s imagination fill in the details of a character’s backstory. Like Riordan – we know he tried to save his brother Aidan and failed, that he became a Shadow Hunter, and that his first wife joined the Rebels and tried to murder him to score points with her new friends. I could write out a prequel series describing those events, but I think at this point it wouldn’t be as vivid as whatever the readers have in their imagination.

Besides, that would be a distraction from the main story!

So, that is why I don’t set up preorders and I don’t usually write prequels.

-JM