How to develop and execute a successful series strategy
A behind-the-scenes look at how we built the Command and Control series.
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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A few years ago, David heard an interview where author Colson Whitehead was asked about his “overnight success” following the release of his bestselling novel, The Underground Railroad.
Whitehead politely reminded the interviewer that he had published NINE BOOKS before this one hit the bestseller lists.
So much for overnight successes. We have yet to meet a writer whose career worked out the way they thought it would when they started.
This anecdote has some resonance for us because we are in the process of releasing Covert Action, Book 5 of our Command and Control series and our ninth co-written book, in a few weeks.
In our last post, How (not) to develop a series strategy, we recounted the tortured path we followed in writing our first series, The WMD Files. Over the course of six years, we went from finishing one book to completing an entire series, crowdfunding, independently publishing and landing a book deal with St Martin’s Press.
The simple reality is that when we started writing together, we had only a vague idea of what we were doing. We weren’t even sure we could finish ONE book, much less ten. Finishing was the goal; publishing was tomorrow’s problem.
We ended the last column on a cliffhanger. Our contract with St Martin’s Press was finished and there was no renewal offered.
The truth is that we were at loose ends with respect to our writing path. We were working on a fifth novel in the series, but it wasn’t going great. Every time we turned around the story seemed to grow in a new (and interesting) direction. We were 90,000 words in on the unnamed work and the end was nowhere in sight.
The mysterious call we referenced at the end of our last column was from Andrew Watts at Severn River Publishing. Andrew is a fellow USNA graduate and a successful military thriller author and marketer. In fact, he’d parlayed his success into a small imprint focused on mysteries and thrillers. His company ran on a revenue share model: he covers all the costs of production and marketing and splits the profits with the authors.
Andrew wanted us to write a new series for his publishing house. New characters, new topic. We balked. We had put a lot of effort into developing Don Riley and the CIA’s Emerging Threats Group and we wanted to keep them! Would it be possible to write a new series with the old characters?
Well, no, not really.
A slight explanatory detour is required here. Publishing contracts with Big Five Four conglomerates are massive beasts of legalese gymnastics. Ours, for example, was 28 single-spaced pages that covered every possible aspect of the IP contained in our books, including follow-on novels in the same series. The entire process of negotiating the contract took more than three months.
We consulted a lawyer and were told that even though St Martin’s had not renewed us, we were not off the contractual hook. Unless St Martin’s released us from a specific clause in our contract, we had to take any new book with the same characters to them first and they had the option to buy the book. Obviously, no other publishing house wants to greenlight a book that another company has first rights to.
After weeks of consultation and strategy about how to approach St Martin’s, we got frustrated and stormed the castle. We wrote an email to our former editor explaining the situation and asking for his advice. He gave us the release immediately.
Problem solved. We signed a (much more reasonable) contract with Severn River Publishing immediately and got to work.
A new series strategy
Clean sheet of paper time. We made a few important series decisions right away.
No more asking what do we write next? We would plan out at least the first four books of the series in advance.
The books would be serials (i.e. the action from one book flows into the next), as opposed to a grouping of stand-alones. Each book would contain enough background detail such that you could read them out of order, but the best reading experience was serially.
We would take the 90,000-word behemoth work-in-progress and turn that into the first two books of the series.
When we analyzed the book we had in progress, we realized that we had graduated from the “individual threats” premise of The WMD Files series to a theme of Great Powers global conflict.
We leaned into that theme. If our brand of writing was authentic, near-future, national security thrillers, we wanted to tackle the different aspects of a comprehensive Great Powers conflict story spanning multiple books.
Our series concept was to extrapolate the national security threats of the “real world” into the future along four axes:
Which countries or non-state actors have the military and economic juice to take on the US and her allies.
What are the new tools of power (AI, cyber, social media, private military contractors, for example) and how will they be exploited.
How is new military technology being deployed, esp. unmanned platforms.
Who are the characters driving international relations and foreign policy
If these themes look familiar, we discussed them in detail in our posts The new world order is Allies vs. Autocrats and The Russian coup that wasn’t.
Get to Work!
Contract in hand, we roughed out the action of the first four books:
Book 1 – Through a series of external and self-inflicted events, the US is drawn into a series of international conflicts, stretching military resources to the breaking point.
Book 2 – China invades Taiwan. The US responds too little, too late.
Book 3 – With the US in a weakened state and the world distracted by the Taiwan Conflict, Russia invades Ukraine.
Book 4 – The increased use of private military contractors, a theme in the prior three books, causes an international conflict.
The first two books were shaped out of the material developed in our 90K work in progress. We basically took the narrative apart chapter by chapter and expanded the story into two books, each more than 100K words. (100K words is about 400 or so pages.)
In terms of support, Severn River Publishing (SRP) was as good as their word. We wrote a detailed outline for Book 1, now titled Command and Control, as well as a treatment for Book 2, Counter Strike, and worked with their developmental editor to refine the story. (We worked with the same developmental editor for the first four books.)
It took us the balance of 2020 and the first half of 2021 to write and edit both books. The editorial team at SRP was top-notch as was their selection of a narrator for the audiobooks in the series, Steve Rausch. Their cover designer was also excellent, bringing to life the themes of Great Powers conflict in the artwork for the books.
Command and Control launched in January 2022, followed a month later by Counter Strike. As we write this column two years later, these two books have garnered nearly 10,000 reviews combined.
In the middle of 2021, as soon as we’d finished the first two books, we worked through the outline for Order of Battle, our fictional telling of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. We started writing in the summer and into the fall.
Another explanatory detour about the book business is in order. The best time to sell your next book is the instant a reader has a great reading experience with your current book. At the end of all of our novels, you will find a link to (pre)order the next book in the series. For the author, this means that we need to have the cover and book description locked down BEFORE the previous book goes on sale. Do the math: we decided the detailed story for Order of Battle, our fictional Ukrainian invasion in late 2021, when we finalized the sales page for Counter Strike, which went on sale in early February 2022.
Art does not always imitate life. And that’s a good thing.
As we wrote our novel about a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Putin began massing forces along the Ukrainian border. By the time our book was finished, the unthinkable happened: an actual invasion of Ukraine had taken place.
We didn’t think Putin would go through with it. Like almost everyone else, our best guess was that he would rattle sabers all over the region to extract some kind of concession from cowed European countries. If Mr. Putin did go through with an invasion, we expected Ukraine to fall to the mighty Russian war machine.
We were wrong. Twice. Mr. Putin did invade, and Ukraine surprised the world with their incredible response.
This turn of events left us wondering what we should do about our book. Scrap it? Revise it? Since we were in the editing phase at the time of the invasion, we could have rewritten it, but after a close reread, we didn’t change a thing.
Why?
For starters, we write fiction. We’re not here to predict the future, we try to extrapolate possibilities into an exciting story and (best case) maybe stir a policy maker somewhere to think about a real-life situation in a new light. The greatest failure is a failure of imagination—if we can prevent one of those from happening, then we will have done everyone a service.
The other main reason we chose not to alter the manuscript was because it explored two themes that have great importance to our future national security and the rest of the series.
Private Military Contractors: The Russian Wagner Group—and the fictional US counterpart Sentinel Holdings--were significant parts of the plot in Order of Battle. In real life, Wagner has had an outsized, and sometimes colorful, impact on Mr. Putin’s Unnecessary War, including a mutiny in the Russian ranks.
Unmanned Assets: Probably the most significant development in the Ukraine War (real and fictional) is the use of drones as a weapon of war. This was something we anticipated but the ubiquitous use of unmanned weapons has far outstripped anything we imagined. In our book, we have a terrifying scene in which an autonomous pack of killer robots in deployed. When we wrote the scene, we thought we were pushing the bounds of science fiction…maybe not.
We do not consider it an exaggeration to say that unmanned weapons have changed the outcome in this conflict. There is no going back.
Order of Battle, Book 3 of the Command and Control series, was released in September 2023.
Looking forward
As Mr. Putin’s Unnecessary War dragged on, we dove into work on Book 4, Threat Axis. The premise of the novel is that the use of private military contractors grew to such an extent that they became a national security threat of their own—able to challenge even the military might of the United States.
PMCs, as they are known, are not beholden to elected officials or even to their favorite autocrat. They work for the highest bidder, and for them, more war means more business. If the warring nation-states decide they want to end a conflict, then maybe the PMCs take matters into their own hands.
Taking fiction too far? Maybe, maybe not. The point was to portray the outsized influence that non-state actors have in the national security arena. And it’s a large influence. The use of the Wagner Group as a key part of Mr. Putin’s Ukraine invasion strategy is well-documented and the public assassination of their leader Yuri Progozhin was a vivid demonstration of Putin’s continued hold on power. Just because the invasion failed doesn’t meant the threat is not very real and very dangerous.
Threat Axis was released in April 2023. In terms of the series strategy, the fourth book also closed out a number long-running subplots that had been hanging in the background of the narrative since Book 1. As we headed into the final books of the series, we were venturing into national security threats that are not typically discussed as global hotspots.
In the next installment of this behind-the-scenes series about developing and executing a series strategy, we’ll discuss the reasons why we chose Central Asia as the setting for the last two books in our Command and Control series.
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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I couldn’t agree more with your insightful article. I threw in the towel because I couldn’t pass the planning stage on a whole series. My four book series rolled out over 5 years. What I love about writing is the rush of the first copy. Planning never kept my interest. I was the same as a teacher: planned lessons bored my students but spontaneous lessons drew them in. I always go with my guts. Trouble is guts don’t market books, or release a new one every six months. Planning and marketing.
I echo a lot of your concerns in my early writing career. What I am doing now is filling up the space before my main character commands a heavy sapper company that is on the forefront of a VII Corps offensive back to Poland and Ukraine. There is a LOT of unexplored space in my Breaching Ain’t Easy universe and I have received assistance from countless people that have been there before me. Thanks for the content and good luck with your next book. Rangers and Sappers lead the way!