Always Leave Them Wanting More: The Joy of Writing Series of Books - by Debbie Young
Celebrating the joy of Sherlock Holmes with BBC Radio Gloucestershire earlier this year (Photo: Dominic Cotter) A great way for authors to build readership and to enamour loyal fans is to write series of books about popular characters and settings. It's much easier to sell stories about familiar heroes and heroines than to persuade readers to try new ones. As the author of the first in a proposed series of seven Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries , I have naturally been happy to learn of easy marketing tactics to sell series: You can offer the first in the series at a reduced price to get the reader sufficiently hooked to buy the rest at full market price. Even better, if you're marketing ebooks (and most indie authors, like me, will make the bulk of their sales in digital form), you can even offer the first in the series for free, because you have no production costs to cover once you've set up the digital file. Then there are the prequels you can ...