Committing to a Series

I guess I should have realized that writing a 5-book series was going to be a serious commitment. I’m kind of regretting it right now. If I had it to do all over again, I would have started with a trilogy. Even at the respectably-prolific pace of a novel a month, I was still committing to about six months of work. And that’s fine. I’ve learned a lot and put in the groundwork to build up a solid ARC team and newsletter base.

But I’m feeling a bit of series fatigue right now. I’m almost to the 20K mark in DBDW, and though I’m getting the words down, it’s a bit of a slog. I kind of just want to be done with the series. I hope that doesn’t affect the writing negatively. But I really want to start in on something new. I’m reading a lot more in the shifter romance genre and getting a lot of good ideas about where to go next. One good thing is that I don’t think I’m going to stall out. I still have a strong vision for where the rest of this book and the finale are going to go. So that’s good. But even at six months, it is definitely feels like a long-term relationship!

I’ve considered taking a break from this series to write something else. But there are a couple of reasons that seems like a bad idea. One, I want to give readers the expectation that I’m going to publish on a regular basis, and that I’m not going to delay or abandon a series. I would think for most readers, if they saw an author with an unfinished series start an entirely new one, that might just tick them off a little. The other big reason is that I feel like I would probably lose momentum. I’m pretty entrenched in this world right now, and if I wrote something entirely different, I’d have to immerse myself all over again and that seems bad.

So I think from both a writing and marketing perspective, it’s best to push through and finish the series. I might be able to recharge my batteries a little by taking a break and/or working on something else, but I think I’d lose more than I gained. Hopefully I can still get the first draft done by the end of next week, just before Christmas. Going into the holidays knowing I only have one more book to write will make me feel a lot more confident.

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