Falling for the Shifter is nearly finished. I just have a couple of thousand words to write on part five before I start editing & formatting, then I’ll get it up sometime next week.
That means I’ve nearly finished my first serial and it’s been a learning experience. I’ll share my thoughts on the whole process in this post below. Also, my head is swirling with ideas for the next series and I’m being drawn to a dark sexy vampire story (stay tuned for more about that soon).
But first, let’s chat about Shifter.
I like Shifter. It’s fun, it’s sexy in parts, and I dig Jade (our female lead). She’s smart and sassy, but she’s also vulnerable. If my writing skills were better, I’d be able to flesh her out more, but right now I’m happy with her and the series.
But that doesn’t mean the series was without some learning experiences.
Take book 3. It’s clearly the weakest of the five. Not much happen except Jade being a bit overly angsty. My goal for that book was show how the relationship was progressing, but that her and Tarben (our bear shifter) were both still having doubts. I’m not sure I achieved that, so I’m going to work on upping my skills in characterisation in the next series.
Series length. Each part is 10k words (or thereabouts). While it was a comfortable length for me to write for my first serial, looking at Amazon, many of the more successful writers are writing higher word counts. For serials like I’ve done, they are around the 17k-20k range. I’ll need to up my word count if I want to compete.
Speaking of, serials. I know many people hate them. They like a good standalone story, not a “chopped up novel” (by the way, I wrote it as a serial not a chopped up book, but I digress). Personally though I love serials. I especially love writing cliffhangers so I’m going to continue to do that. I may try to fit a stronger mini arc in each part, but the next series will be in serial format with either four or five books.
Time between releases. The write and publish, write the next one and publish that, didn’t work for me or my readers. There was too long a gap between each book. In reality, for a serial of the kind I’m writing there should be only one week, no more than two weeks, between each instalment. But I’m not a fast enough writer yet to do that, so with the next series I’m planning on pre-writing a lot of it before I start releasing. I think that’s fairer to everyone.
So that’s it. My thoughts on writing Shifter and plans for the new series going forward.
I’ll keep you informed as I go.
Stay sexy,
Tully
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