First In Series Blues, Part II
Reader Scott has an insightful comment about writing the first book in a series:
“Okay, Gray Knight purchased on 30th Jan 2016, Child Of the Ghosts 10 Feb 2016. John Schettler’s Kirov series wasn’t found until about book 15. Keep at it. As a reader I want to know that a new author is a stayer not a dabbler. Time helps build up review counts as well. No longer do new authors have to make it in the first quarter or be banished from store shelves. New readers can happily binge on a digital backlist that is stil available.”
That is an excellent point.
See, in the Bad Old Days of traditional publishing, a book had to do well during its first 90 days or so, otherwise it would get pulled from shelves and the excess books would be sent back to the publisher and pulped. (The “returns system” that lets booksellers return books to publisher at no cost is in my opinion an obsolete and wasteful legacy of the Great Depression that should be eliminated. Fortunately, Amazon is doing that by default.)
And if the book did well, that might be the kiss of death for the sequel. Let’s say the first book had a print run of 10,000 copies, and 8,000 of them sold. Yay! But for the second book, the publisher will only print 8,000 copies, because that’s what sold. This time, only 6,000 might sell. So the publisher might cancel the series or give up after the third book, because projected sales of only 6,000 copies? Can’t hack it, so the series gets cancelled. If in the old days if you had a favorite series that got canceled when there was obviously still gas in the tank, that was probably what happened. (And this doesn’t even account for Unexpected Events that could screw things up – like the price of gasoline spiking, or a truckers’ strike, a natural disaster that closes a major freeway, the publisher turns out to be embezzling, that kind of problem.)
A good account of that kind of process is here, though it’s good to see that the writer in question landed on her feet afterward.
To break out of that death spiral, you needed major bestsellerdom – like Nora Roberts/JD Robb or Sue Grafton or John Sandford or Lee Child, or for fantasy and science fiction, like Jim Butcher or Terry Brooks or Robert Jordan. Think “household name” level of bestseller, or for SF/F, a name that everyone’s heard of within the genre.
Nowadays, of course, that isn’t a problem. You can self-publish whatever you want, so long as the rights to your series aren’t tangled up with a legacy publisher. If it doesn’t sell at first, so what? It’s not like it costs anything to keep the ebook available. You can write sequels and start advertising the first book, and then the series might start selling.
So, when a writer feels pressure for the first book of his series to do well in its first 90 days, that’s a legacy of the Bad Old Days, when a book had to do well in that timespan or it was done. Nowadays, thanks to self-publishing and ebooks, a series can take as long as its writer wants to build up an audience.
-JM