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 ...