The Trouble With Sequels – When Writers & Readers Beef
It’s no secret that sometimes readers and writers don’t get along. Your favorite authors are like cousins, who you adore, although you don’t always see eye to eye. When a book is great it’s on and ‘we be like two peas in a pod’. You love the story, we love you for feeling us, and all is right with the world! But then something happens that the writer does in the book, that pisses the reader off.You’d give anything to tell us to our faces, but you can’t reach us (we’re probably writing). So what do you do? You swear your irritation with us (sometimes in public – shame on you), and vow to never read another book by us again (even though you secretly wait for the next release).
The reason for your disdain with us could be anything. For instance, you may want us to keep your heroes alive for infinity when to us, sometimes anyway, they simply must die (although it hurts us as much as it does you). And then we do the ultimate, make the book a sequel, which you must wait to read.
I listed below a few reasons why sometimes we must create sequels so you can understand us better:
1. We All Must Grow – Whether it’s the deranged Yvonna Harris from the Shyt List series or Yvette and Mercedes from the Pitbulls In A Skirt series, great characters must have time to grow properly. Sometimes one book is not enough to make the journey authentic, especially when there is lots of drama! You would be pissed if we created a 500-page book (which I did with Redbone).
Think where we might be if we didn’t have Madjesty (from the Raunchy series), a troubled teenager whose alcoholic mother raised her as a boy. Madjesty didn’t come out until book two, but she was a product of a sequel all the same.
2. The Right To Keep It Real – I don’t know about you, but I grow weary of books where our favorite characters do the same thing every time without change. After all, how many times can a fly female character pull a gun on someone, without repercussions? Or how many times can someone seek revenge, without the tables eventually being turned on them?
In life people go through ups and downs, and it is through these ups and downs that we find our strengths and weaknesses. There will be times when your hero reigns, and times when he or she fails, but a real author recognizes the importance of making the journey actual. And a sequel allows for the growth that is necessary, realistic and authentic.
3. Writing Is What We Do For A Living – while its true that writers, who do what they love anyway, never write simply for money, for many of us it is a job. I have dedicated my life to you, and storytelling, and I give it all of my attention. Great characters are as valuable as stocks and bonds, and if you think it’s easy to create people who jump off of the page, think again. I can’t count the number of times where readers want the next book right away, and it is always easier, and more heart felt, to work with characters already developed and loved. It would take more time, if you care about your readers anyway, to create a new world from scratch. Hence the sequel!
ABOUT T. STYLES
Author. Show Host, Motivational Speaker. Award Winning CEO of The Cartel Publications – an international and independent urban fiction publishing house. Toy’s publishing house The Cartel Publications, is the face of today’s urban fiction and street fiction industries. In both the digital and print world, the Cartel represents the best her generation has to offer in African American literature. She has aptly been dubbed “Urban Fiction Empress” and “a literary master”.
Toy is multifaceted and currently runs an independent publishing company, movie production company and popular Washington DC and Maryland area book store. In addition, she facilitates her popular seminar “How To Write A Novel In 30 Days”, using her non-fiction novel of the same title. Toy consults authors and publishing houses on what it takes to achieve success and longevity in the industry.
She has been featured in The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, Essence Magazine, Don Diva Magazine and Urban Book Source. She has been awarded Author Of The Year by AAMBC and was voted Most Underrated Author by The Urban Book Source.
When not writing, running the Cartel or producing independent movies based on her company’s novels, Toy travels and shoots videos for Cartel TV, a show geared toward her publishing house. Her first movie, Pitbulls In A Skirt, under her movie production company Cartel Urban Cinema, is due out in 2013.
Her novels include, The End (How To Write A Book In 30 Days), A Hustler’s Son (series), Black & Ugly (series), Raunchy (series), Shyt List (series), Pitbulls In A Skirt (series), Redbone (series), The Face That Launched A Thousand Bullets, Quita’s Dayscare Center, Reversed, Luxury Tax, and Cold As Ice.
