How Do You Market a Sequel?

Seriously, how do you do it? This is article is mostly to ask that question. So if you have some insight, please share it in the comments here, or wherever you found this. I’ll appreciate it and perhaps so will some of the other readers. In the meantime, I’ll share some of my thoughts and plans.

I had marketing on the mind from the get-go. I knew that I would be handling it myself once I got published. So many of my decisions, in the beginning, were made with that in mind. As a historical novelist, I chose the American Civil War because I knew it had a huge built-in audience. As an avid reader, I knew that I was much more likely to buy a novel in a series from one of my favorite writers than a stand-alone novel. Once I’m in a series, I feel almost obligated to buy the next. But does everybody feel that way?

I realize that writing a series can also trap you into the vortex of a diminishing audience. When you think about it, it makes mathematical sense. Say 100 people read your first book.  Will all 100 read the next? If you’re lucky, maybe 80 of them will come back for the second. Then maybe 60 come back to the third. You can see where this is going. So following this logic, it seems the best approach is to keep loading people into the top of your funnel by constantly pushing your first book.

But you worked so hard on the second! Plus, your friends and fans are getting burned out by constantly seeing you promote the same book they’ve already read. Heck, they might not even know you wrote a second one or even more!

K.M. Ashman is one of my favorite authors. I’ve read several of his series. I’m also friends with him on Facebook, which delights me to no end because I’m a total fanboy. I was reading his Blood of Kings series as they were coming out. The first three were numbered, but I noticed the fourth one wasn’t, nor did it bear the “Blood of Kings” series title. I asked him about it. He told me his publisher said that numbering books and labeling them in a series discourages new readers. Interesting. I can see how that would work. You see a book at the store. You think it looks great but oh wait…this is book four and they don’t have the first one, or maybe you don’t want to go through all the work reading three whole novels before you can get to the one that caught your eye.

This brings us to the question of what kind of sequels you are writing. In my studies, I have found there are basically two kinds: episodic and serialized.  James Bond is a perfect example of an episodic series. You don’t have to read every book or see every movie to enjoy the next one coming out. All you need to know is that he’s a British spy and everything else will be explained in the episode. You could pick up any of Ian Fleming’s novels or watch any of the movies as your first, and be fine. In other words, each installment is a stand-alone narrative that can be consumed in any order. This is probably the safest way to write a series since your readers can jump in at any time.

The best example of serialization is soap operas in which the overall plot continues across multiple installments. Many of the shows on streaming services work this way: Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Outlander, etc. In books and films, think The Lord of the Rings. If you read or watched the middle installment, The Two Towers, first, you might be a bit lost. Who are these people? Why is this ring important? What the hell is a hobbit?

Serialization has its benefits for sure. If you write a great novel and end it with a “cliffhanger,” you could have readers chomping at the bit to get to the next book. But if your first book isn’t that great, your readers may never know just how great your second one is.

I try to ride the line with my books. Each one is a complete story in itself, for sure. But The Perils of Perryville picks up directly in the aftermath of Rampage on the River. Both of them continue an overall story arc that will come to a completion in my planned third installment of the 2nd Michigan Cavalry Chronicles: Blood for Blood at Nashville.  I have other novels planned afterward that will be related to this series, but more on that later. I realized when I wrote Perils that my reader might not have read Rampage first. So I wrote it with that in mind, giving them just enough exposition to understand what’s going on and the motivation of my characters, without boring someone who just finished the first book.

So this brings me back to my question: how do you market the sequel? I asked that in one of the writing groups I’m in on Facebook. I got a lot of answers. The two schools of thought were: keep pushing people into the first book, or push the second. Most people said I should push the first book for the same reason I said before: get people into the funnel. A few said I should concentrate my marketing efforts on the second novel, and even though they were clearly in the minority, they made an excellent point. Since my sequel is marked as “Book 2,” it might motivate the reader to buy the first one. So in other words, promoting my second book might actually help the sale of my first. This is the strategy I decided to adopt.

Of course, this brings us back to the problem I stated before: readers might not want to do the work of reading the first novel or it may not be available to them. To counter this, I put this in the description, and in the blurb on the back:

This is the second book in the “2nd Michigan Chronicles” series. You don’t necessarily have to read the first book to enjoy this one.

I was even more overt in the preface:

YOU DON’T NECESSARILY HAVE TO HAVE READ THE FIRST BOOK TO ENJOY THIS ONE.

Hopefully, the all caps will make that jump off the page to the casual browser. I think ultimately, a trilogy is as far as you can get away with a serialized series. I do have a prequel and a sequel to the trilogy planned, and even more afterward, but I plan to take a more episodic approach to those even though they will push my characters and their legacies further and further into time.

So what do you think? Is my plan sound? How would you handle it? How have you handled it? I’d love to know!

If you like this, I have a little inexpensive booklet on writing that you might like. Check out the preview below.

Here’s a preview of the first novel in the series:

Here’s a preview of the sequel: