Series Sell Better Than Isolated novels

...which holds true in non-fiction as well. For example people who write diet books, follow the diet book with cook books, and exercise books, and smart shopping books. The same holds true for produc ts and how they build on each other. I see buying series in my own purchasing patterns - if I like a series, I’ll snap up every book in that series because I want to find out what happens next. Every novel has an arc that takes it from beginning to resolution. Series have longer arcs. Sometimes each story is complete within itself. Sometimes a novel is actually a bridge to the next novel – same for movies. An example in a familiar movie series “The Return of the Jedi” is one of those bridge stories that gets us from the first to the third movie – a good story but not nearly as satisfying or stand alone complete as the first and third. Almost every third book in the Harry Potter series is a bridge book although JK Rowling pulls them off better than many series authors. Lee Child with his Reacher series really writes stand alone stories that are not at all dependent on each other and you can see the character evolve through the series. Always think in terms of how you can use what you’re writing in a series right from the beginning – whether you’re working in fiction or non-fiction.