Would it be better to write a trilogy over a much longer series?
I'm planning out a long series (more than five books as is). It's very optimistic, I know. But I'm just wondering:
Would it be better to plan out my series as a trilogy, leaving room to expand if the series is successful?
I feel like publishers would regard trilogies as a safer bet than a long-winded series, but then again, I don't know much about the publishing world.
My background: I have not published any novels so far. If successful, these would be my first.
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3 answers
I feel like publishers would regard trilogies as a safer bet than a long-winded series.
But then again, publishers regard works from well-known authors as a safer bet, too. To paraphrase Brandon Sanderson (as talking of his latest series, The Stormlight Archives), once you start getting fame (and some sales below your belt) you will have more leeway, since your publisher will be more confident that you'll sell (or even, deliver).
As an unknown author, selling a 4+ series will be somewhat a difficult predicament, especially if those books are not self-contained. Selling a trilogy is already difficult (some readers will even look at the first entry of a new trilogy with distrust). Also, since your publisher doesn't know you, he doesn't know if you can pull it off.
Writing one good (publishable) book is hard enough, but delivering more than four? Without dropping the pace or the quality of your work?
Of course it can be done, but there will be plenty of reasons to be skeptic.
So, your best bet is to plan and sell your books as single, self-contained stories, with growing potential.
Let's imagine that you have already the first book written down. Ideally, you don't want it to be just a "setting-up" book for later entries: it has to have its own story arc, its own character struggles, and its own resolution.
Once you have polished it enough, you could go to a publisher and say
"Hey, look at this. It's great for X reasons and you should totally fund it. Also I've already a sequel planned up if it goes well".
This is already more reasonable, from a publisher point of view.
You could try the same reasoning trilogy-wise:
"Hey, I've got this trilogy and it's great. You know, if it sells I've left space for more..."
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Prove to yourself and to the world that you can write one decent book. Until then, there is not a lot of point planning a trilogy or a series. Until you can complete one book, you are not going to have any real idea of how big an idea it takes to create one book, let alone to come up with multiple related big enough ideas. Get a sense of the scale and complexity of one book before you try to plan multiple books.
And for this reason, don't expect anyone in the industry to be interested in your series or trilogy plan until they are convinced that you can write one book.
It's not that planning a series of books it hard. Actually, creating a plan is pretty easy. Probably quite a bit of fun. It may or may not be a realistic or achievable plan, but you can't tell whether a plan can be turned into a series of books until you have had the practical experience of writing several good books, or at very least one.
On the other hand, the market being what it is, the minute an agent or editor decides that they like you first book, the next thing they are going to ask is, "Can you make this a series." The best way to sell a series is to write one good book.
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Unless you are a famous author with a track record of finishing books, publishers are going to judge you based on the first book, alone. Each book in a trilogy (or longer series) has to stand on its own, in particular the first book, it must be a complete story in itself.
You can have a plan, an outline of your whole series, or not. You don't actually have to worry about how many books it might be. Rex Stout sold 45 Nero Wolfe detective novels, one at a time.
Publishers want to sell books one at a time; especially from beginning authors, for business reasons. They want to build your audience with the first book; if they fail and/or it doesn't sell very well, they can reject any sequels. If it succeeds, and your sequel is up to snuff, then they can tease the sequel, grow the fan base, and sell even more copies of the sequel. And so on for the third, 4th, 5th. They don't want to go to the expense of producing three books, or the risk of publishing three books at once. That is not how the business works!
You must prove yourself with one book. You can talk up the potential of sequels, your plans for sequels, but for exactly the same business reasons on the author's end, I suggest you tackle the first book and getting it published as a standalone story (with obvious potential for a sequel) before you write the second book, or an epic series.
If you can't sell the first book by itself, then having two or four more in the drawer won't help you at all, you have just wasted your time: The publisher must have a reasonably positive experience with your first book before they will consider anything else.
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