The ASSASSINS ebook is on sale, and the challenges of writing a series

Get my hard work for cheap!

If you haven’t picked up a copy of Assassins Anonymous yet, today is the day to do it. The e-book edition is marked down to $1.99 for a limited time thanks to a BookBub promotion.

At 320 pages, that amounts to only 0.0062 cents per page. Or, since the book took me five months to write, that’s 0.39 cents per month.

Book math is fun!

When does this promotion end? I’m not going to tell you. In part because I’m not entirely sure, but also, it doesn’t matter, because you should be wiggling that little cursor over to this link toot-sweet.

Don’t worry, if you’re looking to save a few bucks but e-books aren’t your thing, the paperback is landing on May 27.

Either way, this is good timing to get in there before the sequel, The Medusa Protocol, lands on June 24.

Oh, and the e-book now includes a teaser chapter of Medusa, which is a fun little bonus!

(I will be including a teaser in this here newsletter at some point soon, so don’t worry if you already have the book…)

Now. Do you need to read Assassins to understand Medusa?

No. Medusa works as a standalone—but your understanding and appreciation for the overarching story will only deepen if you read both.

Which is the crazy thing about writing a series.

You have to thread this weird needle between writing a sequel that is not a explicitly a sequel—because you don’t want to turn off readers who are only just picking up the second book.

It feels weird to be writing a series again. I swore it off after I wrote the five Ash McKenna books (which are currently out of print, but, working on that…). I had a dedicated fanbase of enthusiastic readers, which was great, but it was a small fanbase. Which, for a small press book, is fine.

When you’re playing in the big leagues, you need readers to follow you from one book to the next, in order to keep things economically viable. And not every series is going to turn into a phenomenon like Lee Child’s Reacher books, or Jeffery Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme books.

After the Ash books I said: No more series stuff, because by the final book it felt a little like inviting people to a Tupperware party. The Warehouse and The Paradox Hotel were written with the express intent of walking away from them.

(Which is funny because The Warehouse is currently being developed for TV and the question I got from the team working on it is ‘what would happen in later seasons?’ and my response was a shrug and a look of bewilderment…)

But Assassins really called for the multiple entries. It’s a great setup—you’ve got a room full of retired killers, all of whom can support their own narratives, all with their own histories and traumas to unpack.

And there is a degree of comfort that comes with writing a series book! It’s like slipping on a comfortable pair of shoes. I’m currently writing the third entry, Three Hitmen and a Baby, and I know these characters. I know their voices.

It’s a risk—I’ve got a few more of these in me, at least, but the market will demand what the market demands. If not enough readers find it, I may have to move on to something else.

I experienced that particular heartbreak earlier this year: me and

Alex Segura

wrote a book called Dark Space, and while it seemed to do okay, ultimately the publisher declined to take a sequel. Which is bummer! That was a fun world to play in and I love working with Alex.

I’m hopeful that the Assassins movie works out. There’s been some encouraging news on that front, but we don’t yet have a green light. A movie would send this thing into the stratosphere.

But until then I’ve got word of mouth.

There’s a big promotion coming up for the paperback (more on that soon…) which is timed perfectly for the release of Medusa, so I’m hopeful that it’ll be enough to keep me in this world for a little while longer.

If you’re a fan, the best thing you can do is tell a friend about the book. That remains the single best way to sell books, I think: word of mouth.

All of this said, I’m working on something else that has been a completely different experience.

Next year will see the release of Detour, the book I co-wrote with Jeff Rake, the creator and showrunner of the TV show Manifest. It’s a fun, trippy sci-fi book… but it was sold as and intended to be a two-book story.

So at the end of the first, I actually got to write a cliffhanger and include the phrase ‘to be continued.’

That’s not something I would get to do on the Assassins books. I can leave dangling threads but the story itself still needs to feel complete enough. It was fun to be in a space where I could switch that around.

Why the difference?

Because Random House Worlds will be packaging it as a multi-book “event.” And given the popularity of Manifest, Jeff’s name ought to carry enough cachet to get people to follow the story.

(We just got the cover in for Detour, too, which we’ll be releasing soon, and it’s gorgeous.)

Anyway, this is all to say: writing a series is fun, and challenging, and leaves you wide open to the oscillations of the market.

But this is why, when I worked with new authors, I tell them if you’re writing and hoping to sell a book that’s the start of a series, it has to feel like a standalone. You can dangle some threads but it has to feel complete.

Most publishers won’t buy a series out of the gate. Even if it’s a two-book deal, they may want to keep their options open.

Which is why when you query it, you say that the first book is complete and it has series potential. You can even say the second book is written. But storming out of the gate with a multi-book series deal can be a rare thing.

Anyway.

Go get Assassins if you haven’t, and if you have, tell a friend about it, and I’m going to go and back to working on Three Hitmen and a Baby, and Detour book two.

Okay cool bye!