Writing A Bestselling Series

Chapter 13: Strange Reviews

Most writers kill their own careers. For decades now I've studied promising new writers, and sometimes after a writer makes a great debut, a few years later I wonder, "Where did so-and-so go?" Many authors will start great but then quit the race.

The most common mistake that a new author makes is that the author will have an old novel in their trunk, and they'll convince an editor to buy it—and all of the author's readers will discover why that novel didn't sell in the first place.

At other times, the author just decides to play it safe and write a novel that is too much like the last one that he or she wrote.

But when you write a great book, you set high expectations for your readers, and that means that you need to work harder to gratify them in the future. You can't release a novel that takes a step backwards, that is inferior to your previous work. If you try, you'll lose the respect of the critics and of your fans, and they'll simply quit reading your work.

With each book that you write, you need to try to hit a new plateau. Most fans will never notice what you're doing—that you're raising their expectations—but I'm convinced that the key to writing a great series is that you have to keep pushing yourself.

So when I began writing my second Runelords novel, I wanted to push it to be genuinely better than my first novel in the series. I mentioned earlier that when I wrote that first novel, I'd wanted the series to begin like a conventional fantasy, but then I wanted to change things up, to begin convincing readers that they'd never seen anything like it.

I looked at the field of fantasy and began thinking, What is it that I can bring to the genre? 

 Well, I had a few ideas. Tolkien had brought his love for invented languages and resonance to the field. (See my book, Drawing On the Power of Resonance-- http://amzn.to/2ephAOS) Other authors brought their own tastes to their work. For example, C.S. Lewis came to the field with a heartfelt sense of religious fervor and asked profound moral questions. Pratchett came with a wonky sense of humor. Others brought a love of politics, or a new sense of diversity. But the question that we each have to ask ourselves is, what can I bring? I felt that I needed to bring something new to the table.

Well, I still had the philosophical ideas that I'd been considering from my very first novel, and I wanted to expand upon those. But I needed more.

So I got into developing my world. I created an evolutionary timeline for my creatures—and imagined what had existed on the world, when they had gone extinct, and so on, showing each creature's evolutionary path. The first book that I'd ever written was a field guide to mammals in the weasel family (lovingly created when I was 16, with a lot of hand-drawn images), and so I began developing a field guide to the creatures in the world of the Runelords. In particular, I spent a good deal of time creating my reavers—creatures of the underworld that were similar to ants (with hard exoskeletons), but which also had developed lungs, so that they could grow larger than insects, and I created them with their own sensory systems—an extremely powerful sense of smell (and the ability to create new scents so that they could communicate), a sensitivity to electromagnetic energy (like that of sharks), and the ability to sense vibrations through the ground. Then I had to develop their intelligence and culture, and so on. What I came up with was more alien than most creatures in fantasy.

I began writing the book, and I think that the sense that I wanted to add something more came into play in my first draft. I added a couple of new major characters to the series and had fun with them.

In any case, in Brotherhood of the Wolf-- (http://amzn.to/2edd187), I was especially concerned about the tone of the book. I wanted to get a sense of rising darkness, but also wanted to have enough light in it so that the average fantasy reader wouldn't be put off.