How (not to) develop a series strategy
Yes, Virginia, there is a recommended reading order to our first series--and it's not obvious
Welcome back to the Two Navy Guys Debrief, the (mostly) weekly forum where we look at a national security issue and how we have explored that topic in our fiction.
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This column began with a seemingly innocent and straightforward reader query:
Is there a “right” reading order for your first series?
We get this question often, especially since moving to Substack and gaining new followers, so we figured it would be easy to write a quick post for reader reference.
But somehow, just publishing a list and calling it a day feels…inadequate. You can read our books in any order you like, of course, but there actually is a recommended reading order and it’s not an obvious one. However, to deliver a comprehensive answer, we need to explain what went on behind the scenes as we were figuring out the art of co-writing.
Hence this column was birthed. As we explain how this recommended reading order came to be, we’ll cover a few highlights of our decade of writing together:
1. How we arrived at a writing strategy for our first series
2. How the theory worked out in practice
3. How we changed our writing strategy over time
Strategery is a Beautiful Thing—and we did not have one (at first)
The concept of a “series strategy”1 was not part of our lexicon when we set out to write our first book together in 2014. In A Decade of Co-writing, we told the story of how we became writing partners, but when we started, we had only one goal:
Write ONE complete novel together (and manage to stay friends).
That’s it. Note that there is nothing there about publishing or agents or anything beyond just the act of writing a book together.2
It took us a year to write Weapons of Mass Deception. Once we had a manuscript, we found a freelance editor. From there, we figured out how to run a crowdfunding campaign and publish a book independently.
Something else happened in that time. While writing Weapons of Mass Deception, a news story caught our eye and gave us the idea for Death of a Pawn, a novella based on an actual event in Buenos Aires that, timing wise, tied into the plot of WMD so we wrote that as well.
Wanna do this again? we asked ourselves. Sure! Why not?
Because our goal had only ever included one book, we had no ready ideas for a second novel. We did have a great set of characters, so we looked around for a suitable topic and settled on homegrown radicalism, which was in the local papers during that time. It took us another year to write our second book, Jihadi Apprentice.
Maybe this should be a series…
By the time we finished our second book, we decided it was time to set some ground rules. We needed a plan. Our nascent strategy had two parts:
1. Write a series, The WMD Files, featuring a consistent cast of characters and with each book taking on a different national security threat:
Book 1 – Weapons of Mass Deception was about nuclear proliferation
Book 2 – Jihadi Apprentice – homegrown radicalism
Book 3 – cyber warfare
Book 4 – bio weapons
2. For each novel, write a companion tie-in novella
Under these new rules, we crowdfunded and published Jihadi Apprentice in 2016. We also wrote the tie-in novella, Battle Djinni, an origin story about reader favorite character, Reza Sanjabi, an Iranian operative who works with Don Riley when it serves his purposes.
Let’s go legit
Immediately, we went to work on our third novel about cyber warfare, working title: WAR.EXE. By spring 2017, the new book was done, and we decided to try to get a “real” publisher, which in our mind meant one of the New York “Big Five Four” traditional publishing houses.
There’s an entire future column in the story of finding an agent, getting an offer, signing a two-book deal with St Martin’s Press/Macmillan, which we won’t go into here. Rules of Engagement was released in June 2019. (Note the new title and length of time between signing a deal and book publication. It’s all part of the story.)
We also wrote and published The Athens Job, a tie-in novella about international terrorist Rafiq Roshed, the villain of the first three books in the series.
The Pandora Deception, Book 4 of The WMD Files, was about bioweapons, as per our plan. We turned it into our publisher in January 2019. Scheduled for a May 2020 release, it was delayed to September, during the height of the pandemic. (That delay is also part of our traditional publishing story. A column for another day.)
The final piece of our 2016 strategy was the tie-in novella, Assassin’s Vow. This is the origin story about another reader-favorite character Rachel Jaeger, a Mossad agent who made frequent appearances throughout the series.
Time to Regroup
When our contract ended with St. Martin’s, we found ourselves at a crossroads. Our Big Five Four contract was not what we had expected. In many ways, the experience can be summed up in the phrase be careful what you wish for.
Were we happy? No. Were we unhappy? Not really. We were somewhere south of meh and somewhere north of grrr.
Yes, they paid us well. Yes, we had our fifteen minutes of national exposure. Yes, we found some new readers along the way. On the other hand, we lost a considerable amount of control over our work and there is very little ongoing marketing of our books. Today, those two traditionally published novels are tiny cogs in a very big intellectual property conglomerate in a rapidly changing publishing landscape—and that’s a shame.
This is a long wind-up to saying that even while we were working on a Book 5 in The WMD Files series, we didn’t really have a clear picture of our future.
And then we got a phone call. We’ll explain in the next post.
The “right” reading order for The WMD Files series.
Here’s our recommended reading order for our first series.
Weapons of Mass Deception: The WMD Files, Book 1 (2015, Reef Points Media) When Iraqi nuclear weapons fall into the hands of an Iranian hardline splinter group, the threat to the United States heartland is bigger--and closer to home--than anyone dreamed possible.
Death of a Pawn: An Espionage Thriller Novella (2015, Reef Points Media) This companion story to Book 1 of The WMD Files takes a fictional look at the real-life tragic death of Alberto Nisman and the possible links to Iran and Hezbollah.
Jihadi Apprentice: The WMD Files, Book 2 (2016, Reef Points Media) When an FBI agent digs into the shadowy world of homegrown radicalism, she realizes the real threat has been in plain sight all along. But knowing about an attack and stopping one are two different things.
Battle Djinni: A Military Thriller Novella (2016, Reef Points Media) In the first two books of The WMD Files, intelligence operative Reza Sanjabi has a unique personal connection to the President of Iran. This is the origin story of the most important Iranian you’ve never heard of.
Rules of Engagement: The WMD Files, Book 3 (2019, St. Martin’s Press) A simultaneous cyber-attack on the command and control systems of the most powerful militaries in the world set the US and China on a collision course for World War III.
The Athens Job: A National Security Thriller Novella (2019, Reef Points Media) At the beginning of Rules of Engagement, super-villain Rafiq Roshed has found a new home in North Korea. This is the story of how he got there.
Assassin’s Vow: An Espionage Thriller (2020, Reef Points Media) The roller-coaster origin story of covert agent Rachel Jaeger as she battles her inner demons and murderous terrorists in this stand-alone prequel to The Pandora Deception.
The Pandora Deception: The WMD Files, Book 4 (2020, St Martin’s Press) A bioweapon, codenamed Pandora, threatens the balance of power in the Middle East.
Be happy. Stay healthy. Read (or listen to) a book.
As always, thanks for being a supporter –
David & JR, AKA the Two Navy Guys
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Yes, “strategery” is a word. Thank you, George W Bush.
We promise to write a future post about how our co-writing process has evolved over the last 10 years.
ouch!
“Writing is easy: you stare at a blank page until drops of blood appear on your forehead”, etc.. Sounds like co-writing is twice as easy.