False Apron Strings

The Pendragon Legend

I am really disappointed in this series. Not because of the story, but because of everything else. The story is a great sword and sorcery tale, but it's riding on the coattails of a great name and a great legend. I'm certain all sales were attributed to that name and that timeless legend. Change all the names and change the titles, and it would be great on its own. The way it is, it is frustrating and disappointing. Of course, there are other issues, but I'm just talking about the story here. 

Aside from all the Pendragon names that have next to no connection with the legend, the books are each uncomfortably short. I looked up the first three books on Amazon and they were all less than 150 pages. So, ten books, three to four books combined into one, would make a very nice trilogy.

The next issue is what can happen when all you do to spellcheck is look for those nice little squiggly red lines in your document. There are LOTS of mistakes - repeated groups of words, words where one letter didn't make it, but it still made a word, words missing altogether. I can't help but think that there must have been a plethora of green squiggly lines, but I'm not that good an editor. 

The worst diversion from the legend was about the sword. According to people in this book, the great Excaliber was used once before to unify the country, but then that king went power-nuts and the sword had to be taken away from him. The unity all fell apart because none of the lords were willing to hand that sword over to one of them, so they reforged it into sixteen different swords to be held in trust until someone else worthy of it showed up. Enter Arthur. 

Arthur is running all over trying to get the different lords to commit enough troops to the cause of running off the Huns before they level the entire country. Most of those lords want to run away - understandable considering the devastation the Huns were leaving in their wake. But eventually, they see the light and he manages to gather enough of the lords together to agree that he is the one. Not something he wants, but whatever. He just wants to defeat the evil enemy and get on with a peaceful life, maybe marry the girl he's fallen in love with, which isn't Guinevere. Since these guys agree to pass the 'Sword' on to Arthur, they gather all sixteen of those swords together and reforge Excalibur. When they said that the finished product - which apparently took only a few hours (red flag) - They decided to see who could lift it. NONE of them could, not even Arthur. Out of curiosity, I made a few inquiries and did some math. A swordsmith told me that the average one-handed sword weighs between 1000 to 1100 grams, and google tells me that equals roughly two and one-third pounds. That, times 16 equals almost 37 pounds. Now I would certainly hate the thought of swinging around a 30+ pound sword, but most assuredly anyone would have been able to lift it, especially since it had just come off the forge and was just resting there, not embedded in some stone.

In a further digression from the legend, it was the Norse queen who killed Atilla the Hunn and she was aided in this hunt by Guenevere who was magical enough to be influential in the remaking of Excaliber as well as shapeshifting into a dragon. The queen rode her to Atilla's 'final resting place.'

Just before I'd finished the books I had, I learned there was another book in this series, but I'm not going to buy it so I can't tell you if there ever is a round table or not. 

This book just diverged way too much for me. 

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The Mighty Series

Or so everyone is lead to believe these days.

Of late, I've certainly seen a lot of them. Of course, that might simply be due to the waters I'm swimming at the moment. It seems everyone has, or is working on, or is planning a series. I see it like this: Picture the ocean. Each little ripple across that vast expanse of water is a book. The occasional hill or gentle roll of water contains the multitude of series - the bigger the hump, the larger the number of books in said series. Those smaller humps that might gently rock your boat consist of series number 2 to 4 books. The medium size humps, the kind that might make you hang on in your boat, or catch a cup sliding off the table, are made up of series numbering 3 to maybe 4 books. The big humps, the scary kind that might make you secure the hatches or simply get the flock out of there, are made up of those series of say 5 to 10+ books.

Now lets look at sales: When these waves make it to shore, they all swish up on the sand with a certain amount of foam or bubbles - those equate to sales. Most of those little ripples will generate some foam as it scrapes up on the sand, but not all. A series might curl over in a breaker, and then crash against the sand with a lot of foam and bubbles, but then they're spent too soon after. Now those big waves, the kind that attract surfers from around the world, those make an even bigger splash, but they also might scare some people off the beach - I do know I wouldn't want to hang too close to something like that, though I might be inclined to watch.

My point is, if I see an advertisement for a seventh book, and I don't find it interesting enough on it's own, I'll probably stay away from the entire series.

If you're writing a series, more power to you, but you never know who will find book X before they come across book 1. I look at the blurb, and if that's intriguing enough, I might take a look inside if I can. Given that sample, if I'm left wanting information from a previous book, I won't buy it, and I probably won't go in search of that first book. For me to do that, I have to be really intrigued.

My trilogy might be guilty of this very thing, but it was written as a single book that happened to fall into three parts. What did I know? At first it was over a thousand pages long, and that was just the text part. At the time, I was still in search of a publisher, and I was told that no publisher would take on such a large project from a newbie writer. So, still leaning on the experience of others, I offered the book as a whole, but conceded that it could be separated into three books. Book one made a pretty good splash. Book two, less of a splash, but then it was published in less locations. Book three was pretty much of a bomb. That is the last time I will publish a series one year between books.

I have another series in the works that is plotted out to be 16 books, but since most of them are really quite short, I think I'll only offer them as eBooks (kindle editions). I thought I might offer the book as a whole for paperback, but I'm thinking it might be too big. The biggest CreateSpace will handle is 828 pages. So if I do decide to go paperback with this book, I might release all books at the same time and sell them as a boxed set. Depending on ultimate page count, it might end up being three books. I'm working on book 10 at the moment, so I have a ways to go yet before I need to worry about any of that.

But enough about me.

What I'm getting at, is make each book of your series a stand along story, more or less. It's fine to have each story farther along in your character's timeline, but if your reader can't understand why Prince Caspian is staggering through the woods, going out of his way to avoid his guards, you might lose your reader as he drowns in questions.

Like I said, my series didn't do this. But I'm willing to learn from my mistakes, and above all pass along what I've learned, or at least my opinion of it all. The best series I've read did just that - each book told its own story, and while development might have occurred along the way, and book two is better for having read book one, book two and even book three were just fine on their own. I used to have the Tarzan series once. I don't even remember how many books there were, but they all stood alone. In fact, I think some of them were written by different authors, but I didn't pay attention. It was just another story, another adventure. I'm willing to pick up a book if I know it's the next adventure. Maybe that's why my trilogy doesn't sell so well.

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What is a Series?

The dictionary that came with my computer says:

series |ˈsi(ə)rēz|
noun ( pl. same)
a number of things, events, or people of a similar kind or related nature coming one after another : the explosion was the latest in a series of accidents | he gave a series of lectures on modern art.

• [usu. with adj. ] a set of related television or radio programs, esp. of a specified kind : a new drama series.

• a set of books, maps, periodicals, or other documents published in a common format or under a common title.

and definitions go on from there varying farther from the written word into math and electronics, but you get the idea.

I recently bought three books billed as a series, and I do love a series, otherwise I might not have bought the last two. Now there was nothing really wrong with the books, except that they were way too short for my liking. Anything I can read in an afternoon is too short; I don't get enough time to get to know the characters or get into the story.

These three books did show the progression of a writer; each story far better than the last. They, however, were not a series. There was no connection between the stories other than the country and perhaps time in which they occurred - not the same town - not the same road - not the same characters. There were other issues with these books that won them a less than glowing review, but I have had a favorable discussion with the writer. One must remember not to post a review while we are still pissed off about whatever the issue is.

In our discussion I told him about my three books - no, not my series - my other three books talked about here. The titles of those books have been changed since that post, and I'm not really promoting them as a collection anymore, but they do still take place in the same world, at the same time, and follow the same rules. The third book is still unwritten. I'll get to it one of these days. Just now, I gotta catch up with the timeline on my current work in progress. Major events that happen in this country sometimes have an effect on the happenings in the book. Now don't that sound like fun. Anyway, I'm more than half a year behind on that so I gotta get busy.

So - do you have a series? Or is it more of a collection? What are your definitions?

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