eBook Series & Permafree First Books

eBook Series & Free First Books

I've been on a bit of an ebook-reading spree lately to counteract the stress of working on my dissertation. In particular, I've been browsing free ebooks on Kindle and Kobo, and, picky as I am, I've only found a handful that sound interesting. Most of them, unsurprisingly, are the first books in a series. 

As far as giving out the first book in a series to readers for free in order to hopefully entice them to buy and read the rest of the series, I think this is a good strategy. It allows readers to get acquainted with your writing style and find out if the story is something that they will personally enjoy before making a monetary investment in the rest of the series. This can be a great way to build reader loyalty, so that readers who enjoy your free offering can continue seeking positive experiences with the rest of your books.

However, I've found a bit of a pattern among these free ebooks that has frustrated me both as a reader and a writer. 

Book 1: The Missing Plot (Free)

Many of these first books didn't seem to have a clear plot. I won't pick on any specific ebooks that I've read, because I believe they could be very good if only the books had an ending to them. But most of them didn't. Instead, they ended very abruptly, often before what felt like the real climax of the story was supposed to be, and definitely with zero resolution. For some of the books, it felt like there was very little actual plot, and the book was more focused on character development and exposition, setting the scene for the actual story to take place.

To be honest, it felt like I'd read a 20-chapter sampler rather than a full book with most of these reads, and even though the free ebook offering is meant to give readers a taste of what they're in for for the rest of the series, the fact that the books have such a major issue (plot being a critical factor in any story) has made me more hesitant to pick up the next books in these series. 

For example, two of the books I'd read were fantasy novels, each one the first in its respective series. And each one followed a similar pattern: girl who has always felt out of place and is all alone in the world travels to a location (that turns out to be her home), meets family and friends she never thought she'd have, and learns that she has magic powers. She begins to learn to hone those powers, all the while falling in love with one of the handsome and mysterious male characters, and in the background there's some kind of minor conflict taking place which ultimately ends up putting her in danger as she's attacked by mysterious creatures for no discernible reason and is immediately saved. 

...Nothing much happens after that. Both the books end on a very unimpressive note, one more abruptly than the other. One of them uses a cliffhanger that most readers will have guessed about halfway through the book. The other one has no cliffhanger. It's just the heroine healing from her attack. The end. Nothing to entice us to keep reading.

It left me feeling a bit cheated, as though I'd read the first half of the books and not the full books themselves. Sometimes, my writer mind would take over and I would consider ways of making the book better than it was - of fulfilling the reader's expectations and pushing them towards the next book. For example, maybe the heroine in one the fantasy novels shouldn't have gotten saved; maybe the characters fail and she's taken away, ultimately leading to a cliffhanger in which the main antagonist is revealed (before a daring rescue is attempted in Book 2), along with their evil plans which now give the reader an idea of what the story at large is going to be about (putting a stop to the antagonist).

These books were the first in a series of books, but that doesn't change the fact that they sorely lacked in plot and felt more like books that were relegated only to setting the scene for the actual plot to start taking shape in the next book. And the reason that this is something I want to emphasize is because it seems like there's been some kind of misunderstanding what a book series is. A book series isn't one book being split into a certain number of equal parts - which is what I thought must have happened with some of these ebooks, as early and abruptly as they ended. Even books within a series need to have self-contained plots that begin and end within the same novel. And in a series, you want to push your reader forward by intriguing them. These books did not intrigue.

The more I thought about this, however, the more I doubted myself. I wanted to give my fellow authors the benefit of the doubt. Surely they know what a novel entails, and they must have read series before, so I'm certain they understand how they work, too. Which made me wonder if something else was afoot; something I'd been missing completely.

Book 2: An Unexpected Strategy

I began to wonder if maybe the choice to present the books in such an incomplete way was a marketing strategy in order to sell more ebooks. 

Maybe splitting a story up into as many parts as possible and selling them is a more profitable model than presenting it as a complete book. This would result in several books in the series where there should have only been a few. Maybe it works on a time-saving perspective; finishing one part and releasing it for readers to enjoy as you write the next sections to release, buying yourself time in the process. 

Either way, the author in me rails against this method. But even I have to admit, through my research, that this is a practice that is not only used but encouraged: write short books, have lots of books per series, and publish as often as possible. 

Perhaps this is why a couple of the books felt very episodic in nature, like a few episodes on a TV drama instead of a book. This was especially true of two contemporary fiction titles I'd read, both - again - first books in a series. They focused on romance and family drama, with a wide range of characters, and I could tell that each of them was being set up for a romantic plot (and therefore, book) of their own. But this kind of approach felt muted, and the climaxes, character development, and resolutions ultimately unsatisfying. Nevertheless, I felt it worked better for these contemporary fiction books than it did for the fantasy and science fiction novels I read.

Regardless, I couldn't say how effective the strategies outlined above are from a monetary perspective, so I won't go too deep into whether or not this is a good marketing/book-selling strategy. I will, however, say that there must be some kind of middle-ground that allows for both quality and profitability. And maybe it boils down to understanding the dos and don'ts of series writing.

Book 3: Writing the Series

Let's start by back-engineering the process. 

First of all, if you want to write short books, you need to have a simple enough premise that doesn't require a lot of extra work. So a totally new fantasy world and a highly convoluted plot rife with plot twists that require setting up might be out for the count. This may be why romance and contemporary fiction, along with crime thrillers, tend to take the cake with this particular strategy. They can be short and sweet - and you can write a lot of them not only because of the familiarity of readers going into the stories, but also because they also tend to be the genres that are most formulaic in nature. 

Second, to write a lot of books per series, you might want to make sure that you're choosing a premise that will stretch over several books. For example, say I want to write a story about a business magnate who is about to retire and needs to choose someone to take over her business for her - only she has several children and grandkids, all of them eligible. If I want a short series, I could have her create a competition with three stages, each one making up the main plot for one book. But if I want it to be a big series, I might create a competition with seven stages, so that I can eke out a good seven books for the series. 

Or you can try a matryoshka-style plot for the series, with the first book starting off with a relatively small and focused plot, which then has larger consequences that are dealt with in the second book, which then has even larger consequences deals with in the third book, and so on and so forth. But you have to be careful: this could technically go on for a long time, but you don't want to have readers tire of your story. If you feel like your series is just going around in circles, maybe it's better to keep it short rather than stretch it out unnecessarily.

And finally: publishing often. This one is a tough one, because there's no workaround. You need to create quality stories in order to impress and satisfy readers. That isn't something to sacrifice for a more active publishing schedule. What is truly meant by this strategy is actually that you want to make sure there's not a lot of time between when you published your last book and when you'll publish your next. And in theory, that's fine. In practice, as all writers know, that can be more than just tricky.

So the best option there is to make sure that you've already written the first books - maybe the first two or three - and have already started on the next books by the time you publish your first book in the series. That way, you've got yourself covered for a while, and you've bought yourself some time. On a more practical scale, this is really important to do with a series so that you can ensure that you're consistent throughout and there are no plot holes or irregularities throughout your series. In fact, I recommend writing the whole series before publishing the first book. I know I've changed significant plot points in my series that would have made for a very inconsistent plot if I had released the first books already!

This is one of a range of posts I wrote years ago that I never published. I'm publishing it now because I still feel there is some merit to be found in them, despite perhaps having changed my own thoughts slightly over time.