seven years of self-publishing – changing writing style

AL asks about seven years of self-publishing:

“Have you felt your writing style changes as you write more and more? Have reader responses changed how you continue series?”

For the first question, definitely.  I meander less now. In my first books, it tended to take me a while to get to the point. This is less of a problem now. Like, if I look back at my older books, I think “I would do this differently now.” SEVENFOLD SWORD: UNITY will be about 102k words when it’s done, but if I had written it fifteen years ago, it would be twice as long for no good reason.

For the second question, I do (sometimes) listen to reader responses when writing a series. The biggest example of that would be Kylon of House Kardamnos in THE GHOSTS books. I wrote him out of the series a bunch of different times, but people kept asking for him to come back, so I finally gave in. (You can find a full description of this in the introduction to GHOST SWORD in my EXILE OF THE GHOSTS short story collection.)

Third from FROSTBORN/SEVENFOLD SWORD would be another example. I had always planned for her to be in SEVENFOLD SWORD, but the reader response to her return was so strong that I made her a POV character, which I hadn’t planned to do originally.

And, who knows? Maybe I’ll have another example of unplanned changes in a series due to reader input this summer. 🙂

-JM