When is a collection of books not a series?

This issue has been bugging me for months, maybe even years - what makes a group of related books a series?

You might wonder why I would care, unless you've read my books (hint :-).

I have a group of books that I call, collectively, Zentek Ascendant. There are five books in this group and they are all related to the same subject, take place in the same world, involve the same characters (except the ones who die and don't come back - yes, that happens), and so on.

However, a lot of readers, not just in the fantasy genre, don't like series, especially not when they run on and on and on. I won't mention any books here by name, but there are gobs of them that fall into this category. Think of Anne McCaffrey, Piers Anthony, Robert E. Howard, C.S. Lewis, Frank Herbert, Terry Brooks and others.

Personally, I tend to like reading book series because they feel comfortable if you can get past the first one because the background of the series is already familiar. There's nothing wrong with writing a series of books that use this to their advantage, provided, of course, that they are well-written. I happen to like all of the authors I noted above, some more than others and not all because of their series books.

On the other hand, I also want my books to appeal even to those who don't like series, and that's where it gets a little tricky. Let's take a look.

The classic in high fantasy fiction that still (and properly, in my not-so-humble opinion) dominates the entire genre remians Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The question is, is LOTR a series or not? I say it is not, it is, rather, a set. To paraphrase, it is a single story in three volumes, each containing two "books." The Hobbit and LOTR, if considered as separate works, which they are, is a series, but LOTR on its own is a set - the story in each book is incomplete without the others.

Contrast this to, say, the Dune series by Frank Herbert and now his son, too. Clearly, these are individual stories, none of which is so dependent on its predecessors or successors for its content that you couldn't just pick any of them up and read a complete story. Whether you like it or not I wouldn't presume to say. You can even contrast LOTR by itself (a set) to the whole of the Tolkien collection, which would include the Hobbit, the Silmarillion and others I have not read, that are more in the nature of a series. You can better understand the whole history of Middle Earth by reading them all, but it is sufficient just to read LOTR or the Hobbit by themselves.

Without putting myself in that illustrious collection of writers I named above (yet), I have chosen to call the Zentek Ascendant collection of five books a set, not a series. It is a single, contiguous story that takes up all five books. Although I have made (and continue to make) an effort to make each one viable as a work on its own, at the present time of edits, only Return (book I) and Minx (book II), in their most recent revisions, which are not yet available for direct sale, are set up that way.

Return was always set up that way - I wrote it as a stand-alone story from the beginning. I didn't even know I would ever be writing any more of the story until it was done and I had slogged through it several times (and believe me, back then, it was slogging). After a few (dozen) edits, I began to itch for more, and I decided to continue the story and make the rest of it less structured in how I wrote it, and it carried me through the whole set. Now, with the assistance of a few groups of reviewers of my writing, I am also going through Festival (book III), with at least the partial intent of "fixing" Chapter 1 so that a reader does not necessarily have to read Return and Minx to enjoy it.

Am I shooting myself in the foot here?

I hope not. I just want to make it easier for readers to get one and want them all. I know that this will be much harder for me to do with Metamorphoses (IV) or, especially, Reckoning (V) because the story is a romance in addition to all the adventure and swords and sorcery and other stuff, and there is a suspense element built in as well - who did this to whom and why and how pervasive is this insidious plot? The reader might not appreciate the love story or the whole plot if they just start with Metamorphoses, for example.

My recommendation?

Get the whole set. I promise that it will be worth the read, unless you really hate high fantasy adventure romance epics. Heck, you might even like it anyway!

Let me know what you think....