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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/42214
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

 **Write at least part of your second book before editing your first.**

I'm going to take a slightly different slant than most of the other contributors and suggest that you write about half of your second book before you go back and do a serious rewrite of the first.

The reason? Because almost inevitably, as you start writing your second book, you'll realize that you need or want to make some changes to your previous book. You'll realize that you want to include a little bit more foreshadowing at the end of book one to set up the plot for book two; or you'll want to change the result of a scene or even an entire arc. You might find that the scene in which the trusted sidekick sacrifices his life for the hero should come at the climax of the second book rather than the first. Or that your villain, who was setting up Plan A at the end of the first book, should really be setting up Plan B instead, because the first half of the second book needs to deal with Plan B, saving Plan A for later. You might find halfway through the second book that you don't really have three books of material, only two and a half, so you'll need to rewrite significant chunks of the first book for your final opus to fit into an whole number of books.

If you go back and do your serious editing now, you'll almost invariably find that a lot of your fine-tuning gets wasted. Even worse, you might not be _willing_ to make the necessary changes because you've already spent so much time perfecting those scenes that cutting them is just too painful.

To avoid this extra work (and unnecessary pain), I suggest writing more than just the first book before doing an editing sweep. Personally I find that I almost never want to go back and change events that happened more than half a book ago; hence my recommendation of writing half the second book before editing the first, but you might find that a quarter or a third is sufficient for your purposes. Once the second book is well underway -- once you don't just suspect but actively know that you won't need to make significant changes -- _then_ is the time to prepare the first book for publication.

Original score: 3