In this week we look at the advantages and disadvantages of writing interconnected series.
This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves, Book #3 in the Dragonskull series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store:
ELVES50
The coupon code is valid through March 16, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this winter, we’ve got you covered!
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 293 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March 6th, 2026. Today we are looking at interconnected series/whether they’re a good idea or a bad idea for a writer to pursue. We also have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects.
So let’s start off with Coupon of the Week. This week’s coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves, Book #3 in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is ELVES50. And as always, the coupon code and the link to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes. The coupon code is valid through March the 16th, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook as we head into spring, we have got you covered.
Now for an update on my current writing and publishing and audiobook projects. Cloak of Summoning is done and it is out. You can get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Bookshop.org, Smashwords, and my own Payhip store. It has done quite well and actually got to number one in its category on Amazon US as of this recording, which is all the more impressive because on March 5th, the day my newsletter went out, Amazon US was down for a significant chunk of the afternoon. Despite that, that doesn’t seem to have slowed down Cloak of Summoning any, and it is still going strong. So thank you all very much for that. And as I said, you can now get the book at all the ebook stores.
Now that Cloak of Summoning is out and published, my main project is Blade of Wraiths, the fourth book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. I’m currently 28,000 words into it. So I’m hoping if all goes well and nothing comes up, I can have that out sometime in April. My secondary project is Dragon-Mage, which will be the sixth book in the Half-Elven Thief series and I am 1,000 words into that. That will take over as my main project once Blade of Wraiths is done, and hopefully that will be out in May, if all goes well and nothing crazy happens.
In audiobook news, Cloak of Titans, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy, is now available at almost all the audiobook stores, including Audible, Apple, Amazon, Google Play, Kobo, and the other major ones. So you can get that and listen to it at your audiobook store of choice. Brad Wills is currently recording Blade of Storms, which was the third book in the Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, and he is about halfway through recording that. So hopefully we should have that out in April sometime, if all goes well. So that is where I’m at on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. With that, let’s move on to our main topic.
00:02:51 Main Topic of the Week: Interconnected Series
Our main topic is today we’re going to talk about whether interconnected series are a good thing or a bad thing. First of all, what are interconnected series? Interconnected series have different standalone stories, but share at least some characters and locations from previous series. Many of the ideas and themes carry over as well, but not always.
Romance writers use interconnected series. A couple or couples featured in previous series make an appearance in a new place or with a new group of people. Author Abby Jimenez has characters in her romances occupy the same social orbit in Minnesota across multiple series (and of course, they all share a love of the author’s real life Minnesota bakery, Nadia Cakes).
There’s something of a joke among romance writers that your series can be as long as you want it to be, just make sure that the heroine has a large number of single/unattached sisters so that after the heroine has their happily ever after, you can go one by one down through the sisters and make sure they find their love interests and that they too can have their happily ever afters and extend the series for as long as you want.
One example of a non-romance interconnected series from books I’ve written would be Sevenfold Sword, which is a direct follow up to Frostborn. The new series involves Ridmark, Calliande, and the other characters from the Frostborn series, but they are in a new location with new allies, new adventures, and new adversaries. A reader could (and has) read the Sevenfold series without having read Frostborn, but Frostborn fans get more time with characters they like and there are nods to the previous series.
I fully intended Sevenfold Sword to be a standalone series, but what I found is that people tend to start Sevenfold Sword and then go back and start Frostborn and read all of Frostborn and then proceed on to Sevenfold Sword. So in that sense, the interconnected series was successful because that led to sales of Frostborn that might not have happened otherwise. So with all that in mind and that introduction, here are four reasons interconnected series can help you as a writer.
#1: Readers are already invested. Readers have already spent a substantial amount of time with these characters and places. They have formed a bond with them across the entire previous series and are excited to spend more time with them and find out more about them. Even a brief appearance from returning characters feels exciting to readers.
A very recent example of this from pop culture is how the TV show The Paper used a character from the US version of The Office. Because audiences are familiar with the character of Oscar in Accounting (who is the only returning character thus far), they are interested in seeing what he’s doing and why he’s in Toledo instead of Scranton. Also, his reaction to seeing a documentary crew at work again is exactly what you expect that it would be and is a great moment of humor that perfectly fits the character’s personality. The show does mention some small things from the previous series, like a quote from Michael Scott, but it’s certainly not a classic spinoff and is very much its own creation, reflecting how both office culture and humor have changed a great deal in the over 20 years since the US Office first began airing.
#2: You already are invested as the writer, if you are the one writing the interconnected series. Writers as well as readers can get invested in a set of characters in the world building in a certain series and they’re excited to continue. This is especially true if you haven’t yet concluded the character’s external and internal conflict arcs, because I have found after 171 books that it is generally easier to write a character that has an ongoing conflict instead of one that has all of his or her conflicts resolved.
It’s also a bit easier to write in a series over the long term because in a certain sense it’s less work because you don’t have to create everything from scratch. Cloak of Summoning was the 14th Cloak Mage book, but counting Cloak Games, it is the 26th overall book with Nadia as the main protagonist. By now, I’m very familiar with how Nadia thinks and acts and what she would do in any given situation and the rules of her world and setting are very well established.
And so in some sense that makes it easier to write because I don’t have to create everything from scratch again in terms of the worldbuilding. It’s also in some ways easier to generate the sort of enthusiastic energy to write the book because people are very frequently asking when the next Nadia book is going to come out. So that is heartening for morale, so to speak, as one is writing the book, the knowledge that people are actively waiting to read it once it is finally published.
#3: You can use ideas you weren’t able to in the previous series or expand on existing characters. It’s often said that there are more ideas than time for a writer. Interconnected series lets you use some of the ideas that didn’t make sense to use in a previous series and lets you build on the world you have already created. It’s exciting to watch characters grow and see how familiar places evolve as time has passed.
For example, my Blades of Ruin series returns to the world of Sevenfold Sword in the Kingdom of Owyllain, but a century has passed and the humans from the previous series have died of old age. How did the culture of Owyllain evolve and change in that length of time? How did changes in the monarchy create new problems and enable new enemies and how else did the world change? For example, Sevenfold Sword did not have goblins when I wrote it, but in the century since, the goblins that appeared in the Dragontiarna series have migrated to Owyllain and set up their own new kingdom on the borders.
This also is something I explicitly did in Cloak of Summoning. In one of the previous books, I mentioned that $34 million was stolen from one of the organizations aligned with the protagonist, so that is the major plot hook for this book, trying to figure out who stole that money and why. In addition, I’m able to expand on several ideas from the previous books, such as the Forerunner, Grayhold, and some of the other characters and expand on them and use them in the book in a way I wasn’t really able to in previous books. So being able to do that as a writer is very enjoyable.
#4: A series is often easier to market. New series are famously much harder to market than a continuation or interconnected series. It’s easier to hook people when there is some amount of familiarity involved. After all, after 171 books, I’ve started a few new series from scratch and it is definitely harder to get those off the ground than it is to do say, book seven in an ongoing series.
Returning to the previous example of the show The Paper, there’s a reason that Oscar was featured heavily in the trailers and the promotional materials for the news series, despite being really a secondary character in the show instead of a lead character. Featuring Oscar in the promotions for the new show was a great shorthand for what type and style of show The Paper was going to be, and it made people more interested in the new series than they might have been otherwise. Given that The Paper was apparently renewed for a second season and did well enough to merit a second season, I think that strategy paid off.
However, having an interconnected series may be a disadvantage and it may cause you problems. So here are five potential pitfalls and problems to be managed.
#1: Managing reader expectations. One thing that can make interconnected series difficult is when your new series diverges from the expectations that readers have based on the previous series. They might feel frustrated when a character has changed significantly and acts differently than they might have before, or if there was a conflict that does not meet the way that something might have happened in a previous series. This can be potentially tricky because for the series to work, for the stories to be interesting, the characters have to evolve and change and grow and experience setbacks, but at the same time, you don’t want to drift too far from what drew readers to the series in the first place.
I’ve had a couple of times in my own series when people were not happy about specific plot points in Frostborn or Sevenfold Sword or Silent Order or The Ghosts or Cloak Mage. I think there are two ways to look at that. The first way is what you don’t want to do, and this would be an example of what you should avoid. There’s a story I read about a Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master who had been running a campaign with his players for two years and it all had the same characters and all the characters had leveled up together, but one of the players was moving away to a new part of the country. So at the last session, the player character in question decided to murder all the other players as he left (their characters rather, not real life murder, of course). Just because he could, just because he felt like being a jerk. That would be the very extreme end of what you do not want to do. It’s best to never act out of spite.
The better version of that is if you are writing a long series and you have a clear artistic vision about what you want to happen with it, in terms of character development or major plot events or even major characters who get killed, it’s best to stick to that and not waffle. Yes, you are going to tick off some people. That is essentially inevitable. If you are going to write something, no matter what you write, it’s going to annoy somebody, but it’s best to have a clear artistic vision and stick to it. And if you do have dramatic plot developments, it’s best to establish them well in advance and then to deal with the consequences as well, because you want to avoid as much “handwavium” as possible.
So I think the key to managing reader expectations is to be as transparent as possible. I’ve had people asking me for the next Cloak Mage book already, even though the new one’s only been out for like two days and I’ve said repeatedly that I’ll probably start working on it in May once Dragon-Mage becomes my main project and to also be as reasonable as possible in the writing in terms of making sure everything makes sense as you write it.
#2: A second disadvantage is that you may need to help the reader in terms of glossaries, summaries, character lists, et cetera. If a series continues characters, plots, and locations from a previous series, it can be helpful to provide glossaries, plot summaries, or character lists to help refresh their memories or to explain something to a reader who has not read the previous series. Although an interconnected series should largely stand on its own as much as possible, people still feel slighted if there’s a reference to something they don’t remember or know.
In my own books, I have often included a footnote if a reference contains a plot point from a previous book. I’ve done this in Ghost Armor, Shield War, and Cloak Mage a couple of times, though I haven’t done it in Blades of Ruin because it’s set a century after the other books. People have responded favorably to those, though I have to admit Cloak of Summoning doesn’t have any just because I simply forgot to do them. So I may need to remind myself to do that once we get to Cloak of Frost. But people have responded well to that. I’ve also done glossaries of characters and glossaries of locations at the end of, let’s see, Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, Dragontiarna, The Shield War, and Ghost Armor and people found those helpful. I may do that for other series if they get long enough to require it.
I have seen some authors include summaries of previous books at the start of their new books. I’ve even seen some traditionally published books that do that as well. I’ve never done that. I’m not sure if that’s a good idea or not. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea. I feel like the book should stand as much on its own as possible. If you need to include the summary at the beginning, there might be something wrong, but on the other hand, some people do like those and do find them helpful. So I think that may come to a “your mileage may vary” experience.
#3: The potential disadvantage number three would be adding new characters and evolving old ones. The danger of an interconnected series with a new cast of characters is that readers may not like the new ones as much or they feel cheated that their favorite characters are not there. Having at least one character return gives the reader an audience and anchor while they meet the new characters.
It’s important to evolve returning characters, but it’s also a fine balance to make sure they don’t change in a way that’s forced or artificial. The famously bad examples of this are the legacy characters in the Star Wars sequel trilogy where the filmmakers made Luke and Han into Sad Old Losers just to make the new characters look better by comparison and that did not work out so well in terms of the movie’s reception. The personality needs to reflect what is happening in the new series without sacrificing what readers like best about them from the previous series, which seems to be what happened in the Star Wars sequels.
Returning again to The Paper, if Oscar had suddenly become a cheery and high energy middle manager instead of remaining true to his original personality of a slightly prickly and judgmental accountant, it wouldn’t have felt true to viewers of The Office who spent nearly a decade with that character. Instead, he remains pretty close to what viewers remember, cautious based on his previous experience with the documentary film crew at work and as the first season goes on, philosophical about the passage of time and his relationship with the documentary crew who have been part of his life for so long, which is a good example of character evolution.
I actually think the recent Ghostbusters movies are also a good example of that where the focus is on the new characters, but the legacy characters from the original Ghostbusters movies return and they act as sort of a mentors and sort of guiding authority figures for the new characters.
#4: A fourth potential difficulty is gaining new readers with an interconnected series. Many readers have been burned by interconnected series that claim to be standalone, but as they are reading it, they feel lost in allusions to prior events or feel like they’re missing information. It’s important that even interconnected series stands on its own for readers and that references to the past book actively serve the plot of the current one.
Many readers are also completionists and will want to start interconnected series from the first possible starting point. And I’ve already talked about that with Frostborn and Sevenfold Sword, which makes them less likely to start an interconnected series since they’re possibly committing to a huge multiple series at once.
#5: And that leads to the fifth and possibly the most serious disadvantage of a long interconnected series like that, what I’ve called before Marvel Continuity Lockout Syndrome. I’ve done a previous podcast episode on what I call Marvel Continuity Lockout Syndrome, which refers to the MCU movies. Essentially, a series of interconnected series can go on for so long and reference so many things that it feels daunting for someone to start. The idea of having to catch up or doing homework on dozens of items in order to watch or read something is unbearable for a lot of busy people and most people’s memories can’t sustain a few decades of content like the Marvel Cinematic Universe now has.
This is one reason, in fact, it’s probably the main reason that I started the Half Elven Thief series because of Marvel Continuity Lockout Syndrome. I had written Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, Dragontiarna, Dragonskull and The Shield War. This is this long interconnected series, but I was worried that Marvel Continuity Lockout was affecting its ability to draw in new readers. So I started Half-Elven Thief, which is completely separate and new, and it’s done quite well, and I think partly because it doesn’t have the sheer daunting scale of someone looking at over 50 connected books set in Andomhaim and Owyllain. To mitigate this as much as possible, I think it’s best to make absolutely sure that references to the past series are only necessary for driving the plot of the current one, and that they don’t make the story unnecessarily complicated. You can avoid this by following the good rules of story structure. Make sure the protagonist of the book has an interesting conflict that they have to struggle to overcome, and that the central point of the conflict isn’t references to past books.
So to sum up, interconnected series are a great way to build loyal readers and create more complex characters in worlds. It’s becoming more popular in the publishing world in works like Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere, which proves that readers are willing to read long and sometimes only loosely interconnected series to keep experiencing a world they enjoy. Just be aware of the potential pitfalls and guard against them as best you can, which fortunately can be done with a proper story structure and a little foresight.
So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
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