Series or Serial? Know the Difference, or Suffer Reader Wrath
I have been part of the author community on social media for a while now, and it is interesting to watch the way things change and adapt, but also in the say somethings change for the worse.
This is one of them — Authors chopping their books into parts and selling them as a series. It isn’t a series. It’s a serial.
I see a lot of serial authors tell everyone they’re writing a series, and then when they get bad reviews, they don’t understand why. I mean, they told us it was a series, right? Why should the reader be mad the story stopped halfway through?
Why? Because the author is wrong.
What is a Series?
A series is a collection of books that can stand alone. You can read them out of order, although it may mean you come across spoilers. Books in a series tend to span the same universe or the same collection of character. Harry Potter, for example, is a series. Each story is complete on its own, and you could read the series out of order. You’d open yourself to a world of spoilers, but the general story of each book has a beginning, a middle and an ending.
However, what you may notice is that there is an overarching story that runs through a series of books. And I think this might be what confuses…
