Now most people know that, if you’re going to be selling books, no matter where you’re going to sell them, series do a lot better than single books. It’s because, every time you release a new book, new people will see it and go back and buy up your back catalog. It’s why I very rarely ever do single books, not because I’m just out for money but because I tend to write much larger, sweeping tales.
But this time, I’m doing a stand-alone. Here’s why.Now before I get going, I want to stress that this isn’t something that you ought to do, just to make a buck. If that’s the only reason you’re writing, and I know people who try that, then you’re destined for failure. You can’t just take a single book, throw a ton of filler into it and then try to sell it as two. Or three. Or five. Series take a ton of work and must, by necessity, be much larger, more complex stories than anything you do as a standalone.
Still, sometimes, you just come up with ideas where they just don’t work over a couple of connected books. Either they’re just not complex enough, and trust me, I’m not telling you to write simplistic stories, or they’re just smaller, more intimate tales that don’t lend themselves to something ongoing. Write the story the way the story begs to be written. Don’t force it to be something that it never wanted to be.
In this particular case, I had a dream, it’s got to be 3-4 years ago now, and when I woke up, I jotted it down and it developed into a really nice idea for a quasi-SF/soft-horroresque book. It’s not really horror, although some people will be disturbed by the subject matter and it’s not really science fiction as it happens in the modern day without any super-science or anything like that. It’s not the kind of book I typically write but I really wanted to do this one and so far, everyone that I’ve talked to about the concept has liked it. So, starting Monday, it’s going to get underway. I’ve already got the plot down, the characters built, etc. It’s ready to spill out onto the page.
I knew, from the very beginning, that this was going to be a one-shot. I’ve had people ask why I don’t expand it into something else, but the simple fact is, the main characters who make this book worth writing in the first place, they die in the end. They have to die. It’s the way the story plays out. I’m not going to go into any plot details because I just spoiled the ending, but without the characters, there is no more story to be told. That’s not always the case, of course, I wrote a super-hero story a while back that I intended to just be a one-shot, then people pointed out that it was the world that was interesting and I could just write a bunch of independent books in that world and have a series that way. That’ll show up one of these years, whenever I get to it.
This is also a book that I had to figure out my comps in retrospect. I have no idea where my subconscious came up with this at all, but in trying to describe it to other writers, I had to think in terms of old movies that I’ve seen or old books I’ve read. In fact, none of these things were even made this century. I haven’t seen or even thought about any of them in many years so it isn’t life influencing art. It’s just odd how that happens sometimes.
Anyhow, don’t think that you have to write things that are tailor-made for your typical publication pattern all the time. It will do as well as it does and hopefully, people will like it. Everyone that has heard the pitch has said they want to read it so we’ll have to see how that translates. Write the book that the book decides it wants to be. Don’t try to force it to be what you want, let it be what it is. Once I get this finished, and I should have the first draft done by the end of May, it’s back to pick up another ongoing series again. The grind never, ever finishes.
